Corona Virus – 1st Week of "Shelter-in-Place"

It’s the end of the first week of “Shelter-in-Place” in San Mateo County, also my first week in the new house. Life has come a full circle. After six and a half years away from the Valley, we moved back here since mid February for a job with a biotech company.

It takes moving away for us to realize that Silicon Valley is more like home to us than anywhere else. It also takes leaving the biotech industry for a while for me to realize that I still prefer this area than anything else.

With the skyrocketing price in the Bay Area, we were fortunate to stay at a friend’s place while they were in the UK. We found our new place after a couple weeks, and the move-in-date was 3/15. We have been tracking the Coronavirus, but we thought we had a little more time to be prepared as we wanted to wait till we moved in before buying more food and household items. However, the situation deteriorated fast. On Thursday night before our move-in, my daughter’s school district sent out notification that school would be closed starting Monday. On Friday at work, there were talks of working from home (WFH), but not yet official. Some of my friends working for some other Bay Area companies had already started WFH for a week.

We started grocery shopping over the weekend, but many shelves were already empty in Whole Foods and Safeway. When we were in Costco in the late afternoon, it wasn’t too bad, but the cashier told us they just had a wave not too long ago. We got some food to fill the fridge, but we were having problems finding toilet paper, hand sanitizers, bleach wipes and masks. They were not to be found in the stores, and not found online.

S started online study with her school on Monday. Her English teacher asked all her students to keep a journal about this Coronavirus event. While S like all other kids liked the idea of not going to school for a few weeks, she was not thrilled when the governor announced that school would likely to remain closed for the remainder of the school year. She just moved here and made some new friends and she wanted to keep seeing her friends and her cousins. She had online school for a year when we were in China and she really did not like that. Hopefully she would find this online school better since she could still interact with her friends remotely.

I still went to work on Monday, and words had finally came that all administrative staff should be working from home. I packed up my computer and some notebooks and went home to work. I stopped by Costco near work thinking to look for some toilet paper. It took me a while to park, but once I saw a long line outside of Costco to just get in, I left. I stopped by a Chinese grocery store because I was craving some Chinese food and wanted to have some items. The store was packed full of people. It was probably not the brightest idea. My husband told me that San Mateo County just announced a “shelter-in-place” order and people started to panic buying.

I was going to start WFH on Tuesday, but a meeting with a manufacturing engineer came up so I went to work to learn about the manufacturing line. During the meeting, there was an alert on my phone (and throughout the office) from Santa Clara County about a “shelter-in-place” for Santa Clara as well. This would probably be my last in-person meeting for a while. Since that meeting, I have been working from home completely.

Everyday, we had boxes and boxes of things delivered, from home items to setup a new home, to food deliveries from local restaurants and grocery stores. S really wanted to play tennis and we almost yielded because it would be important for her to keep up with her tennis, but ultimately she did not end up playing. She would just have to find a way to keep fit and keep up with her tennis during time. G was looking for a ball machine but did not find anything suitable yet.

I had a New Patient appointment with the clinic on Thursday and that became a telemedicine conference. S also talked to one of her doctors online as well.

It occurred to me that we really should just lock down, as infection cases and deaths spiked over the last few days, but we are setting up a new home and there are just so many things to get. On top of that, some of the things in the house just did not work, mostly plumbing. Despite some initial issues with the landlord before moving in, he has been quite nice and reasonable since and came in to fix the issues: no hot water in the showers, no water in one of the bathroom sinks, blocked kitchen sink, slow and leaky filtered water from the fridge. Then yesterday when we took some items down to the garage, we found the floor flooded because the washing machine sink was blocked. Luckily only some of the boxes got wet and they were mostly emptied already. The landlord came today to put a filter in the old washing machine so that it could filter out the lint (from thick bath towels) before it could get to the sink and block the tiny opening there.

With every day passing, things seemed to get worse. Our friends who went to the UK were planning to come back by the end of March, but now maybe staying quite a bit longer. Many flights were canceled making it difficult to come back, but mostly she was worried about leaving her parents. They have been tracking the Coronavirus and have been feeding us advice as well. Her PhD thesis from years back on picornaviruses became one of the most cited paper on Coronavirus. Her advice changed from “it was a big overblown” a few weeks ago to “definitely don’t shake hands” now. I was talking to my friends and relatives in China who told me that things have slowly improved, though life is not really back to normal as people are still trying to take precaution when going out and working.

With all this craziness around us, it’s hard to imagine when life would get back to normal. Yet in this testing time, there are outpouring of support from friends and relatives. One of my relatives asked if anyone needed masks. She got my new address and shipped some to us. Another friend of mine saw some N95 masks and toilet paper on Amazon and ordered some to be shipped to us as well. Then another contact whom we recently became associated with in China told G that he manufactured N95 masks and asked for our address to ship some to us. There are other friends in China who offered to ship us masks too… With all this “social distancing”, it is tiny acts like these that keep humanity alive. I count my blessings and hope that the world will beat this pandemic soon.