March 11, 2020: Day One?
March 11, 2020: Day One?
First Days of Paul Orlowicz, Pamela and Charles Orlowicz, and Deborah Durand
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the Covid-19 crisis a pandemic. Future historians are somewhat likely to focus on this date, as periodization is so often a part of the scholarly practice of narrating history. However, for myself, the crisis had already been affecting my life and work for two whole months.
I am an ESL teacher (English as a second language), and I had previously lived and worked in China for seven years prior to moving back to the United States two years ago. As a result, I had and have a broad social and professional network in China. Consequently, I had already been acutely aware of the Covid-19 crisis well before March 11. As a self-proclaimed “China watcher”, I watched and read the news day after day as the virus spread from China to Iran, South Korea, Japan, Europe, and the United States. Additionally, my social and professional networks in China, usually through WeChat, were posting frequently about their lives in lockdown. Some of my friends, who had been traveling for Chinese New Year, posted about their convoluted journeys trying to get back to their homes in China, especially as each day throughout January and February saw new travel restrictions being announced. Chinese New Year, the date of which is determined by the traditional Chinese lunar calendar, fell in January in 2020. Wuhan and the rest of China locked down right in the middle of this fifteen day festival. Chinese New Year is often cited as the largest annual migration on the globe, and the lockdown created indescribable chaos for travelers.
My current work, as well, helped shape my early perspective of the crisis, as I still work “in” China, albeit through an online platform, not in person. When China went into lockdown, there was a huge surge in business for me as an online teacher, and it was not uncommon for my students to talk about their situations. I listened to their fearful descriptions of the crisis morning after morning. Because of my early exposure to these conversations, I fully expected Covid-19 to eventually land on American shores, and spent much of February and early March preparing for a lockdown that I suspected might last many months. When I read about the first case of local transmission documented in California on February 26, I accelerated my preparations. I stocked up on food; I stocked up on any essentials that I could think of; I even went shopping for sweat pants and sweat shorts after seeing one of my friends in China complaining about having to do laundry more often than usual because they were not using most of their wardrobe during the lockdown. By the time March 11th came and went, I was fully prepared to quarantine, at least in terms of material preparations.
Most of my fellow citizens in the United States, in contrast, appeared generally unconcerned about the crisis. As my godmother, Deborah Durand, stated in an interview I conducted with her, “On [March 11], I don't remember it being especially concerned about the pandemic. It seemed like something that was very distant from me.” Debbie is a career nurse and Rutgers-Newark alum from Elizabeth, New Jersey. Through the Newman Center on campus, she met my parents as a teenager, and they became life-long friends. When I was born, Debbie and her husband Alex were asked to be my godparents, and we have always shared a special relationship. For Debbie, “Looking back on [that day], it seems like, WOW, that was like my last pre-pandemic day.” According to her recollection, “it was the subsequent days: the 12th, the 13th, the 14th, that weekend, [that] it became clearer that this was going to be something that was gonna affect my life.” My mother and father, who I had been talking to about the Covid-19 crisis in the weeks before March 11, were, like myself, a bit more aware.
My parents, Rutgers-Newark alumni as well, also met each other via the campus Newman Center. My mother studied zoology and geology, and my father studied math. Eventually, he became an actuarial scientist, a career that gave him a unique perspective as this crisis unfolded. My father, Charles Orlowicz, was already quite worried by March 11. He explained in a recorded interview:
From the beginning when they said “pandemic”, I knew that pandemic was something that could be much much worse. In fact, I tend to be more pessimistic than a lot of the announcements are. Which as time goes on tends to be more accurate then a lot of the earlier announcements are.
For my mother, Pamela Orlowicz, March 9th (despite her not remembering the exact date) was more memorable than March 11th. In her oral history, she is recorded as saying:
I just thought of another day that was significant, again I don't remember the date, but when they basically closed down Italy... ...I couldn't imagine that happening. And then, not too long after, we were closed down too. Then I didn't have to imagine anymore.
I actually remember that day as well, as I was frightened that a similar lockdown and travel ban might soon be declared in the USA. I remember asking my mother if it was possible for them to leave Florida a few days early. That was not a possibility, unfortunately. Despite the range of memories that characterize the “start” of the Covid-19 crisis for each individual, March 11, 2020 is a day that history will likely remember, and it seems worthwhile to document our experiences of the day: those of myself, my parents, and my godmother.
My morning began like every other morning of late: I woke up early to teach lessons online (in Beijing time, of course). I also taught one of my private tutoring clients that morning, and we were working on an essay together entitled: How to Protect Yourself from Covid-19. It was after teaching this lesson that I went outside for a cigarette, opened the South China Morning Post application (as I do every day), and read that the WHO had officially declared the crisis a pandemic. I remember thinking to myself, “It's about freaking time!” I believed at the time, as I still do, that if the WHO had declared the crisis a pandemic earlier, perhaps the world would have reacted more speedily than it did to mitigate its spread. My father had a similar reaction when he heard the news. He explained:
For me, it might have been the same day, like mom, Pam, Pam might've said to me that this, she saw this on the internet, but to me that was like anti-climactic anyway, cause we had already been seeing what was going on. And, an official announcement or not official announcement, to me, didn't make a whole lotta difference, I saw what was going on before that.
My godmother, who doesn't have a particularly clear memory of the WHO announcement, remembers more clearly, “The following days, [when] it seemed like there was just, like a news flash after news flash as things were shutting down.” After my cigarette, I went upstairs and began to prepare for the rest of my day. I was going to meet my godmother for a day in New York City, though I must admit I was also considering canceling on her last minute. Ultimately, despite my anxieties, I decided not to cancel.
While I was teaching my lessons, reading the news, and preparing to go out, my godmother was volunteering. “I volunteer for the the Highline,” she explained:
which is a park space in New York City, that is built along a abandoned railroad track in lower Manhattan, and um, I've been a volunteer for four or five years now, and in the springtime, they allow us to come an' work with the gardeners to cut back the perennials that have, that need to be cleared so that new growth can, can develop. And, I had been there in a day in February and on March 11.
For my parents, that morning was nerve racking. They were disembarking Amtrak's Auto-Train in Virginia, on their way home from their annual two months in Florida. “I remember sitting in the train station in Florida, waiting to get on the train,” said Charles:
And actually then [on March 11] waiting, waiting to get pick up our car, thinking about, you know, who's doing what in terms of masks and protection and what's going on in these crowds. Because back then already we knew what was going on before it was officially declared, and so we had these two time periods that were kind of sketchy for us in terms of how exposed we were.
I was unaware at the time how nervous my parents were about the crowds at the train station. According to my father, the train stations in Florida and Virginia were, “packed with people, totally packed with people. You're sitting one on top of the other, all the way through this whole [process].” My mother recalls a different detail from that train trip. “One of my other concerns,” she said with a chuckle:
which was kinda interesting. I had, I was sick in Florida about two or three weeks before that day, and I was still coughing. And I was REALLY afraid I was gonna start coughing and people were going to look at me and kinda, walk away. But, uh, I had lots of cough drops and it didn't, it didn't cause any issue.
Not long after my parents left Virginia to complete their journey back to New Jersey, I hopped on the 190 NJ Transit but to Port Authority New York.
I remember specifically what I wore on March 11, as it pertained to my already existing anxieties about the pandemic. I wore an old suede jacket that I've had since I was a teenager. The sleeves of that particular jacket are too long for my short arms, and I spent the entire day in New York touching nothing with the skin of my fingers and hands, quite consciously. When I arrived at Hudson Yards, where it meets the end of the Highline, I sat for about a half hour waiting for my godmother, who had not yet finished volunteering. I remember watching the tourists and locals alike milling back and forth and thinking to myself how crazy it was that everyone around me seemed so relaxed. I was not, as my choice of wardrobe indicated. My godmother recalls, “it being, you know, a busy bustling New York City afternoon. There were a lot of tourists around, and it was a nice warm day in the spring. Um, I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary in New York City that day.” Debbie and I climbed the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and I struck up a conversation with some tourists who asked me, as a semi-local, if I was worried about Covid-19. I explained why I was, and also pointed out to them that my godmother was not. After that brief exchange, I do not recall the topic of Covid-19 coming up again in conversation the entire time we were in the city.
Meanwhile, my mother and father were continuing their journey home. “Since we were passing by Wilmington,” she recalled:
I had set up an appointment in this, for this specialist that I see. And timing worked out pretty good, we were a little early cause the, we got our car earlier than expected: you never know when you're going to get your car, you know. But it worked out, and we saw the doctor and we were all set for a, a surgery date. Uh, which was the end of April... ...And then we drove, we continued driving home.
Although my parents were aware of the virus, at least more so than my godmother, it had not yet stopped them from conducting “business as usual”. I did not see them until late at night, after I returned home from New York.
Between climbing the Vessel and seeing Cambodian Rock Band at the Signature Theatre, my godmother and I ate dinner at Carmine's Italian Restaurant on 44th Street, went to Schmackary's on 45th Street for coffee, and had a cocktail at the theatre's bar. I recall quite vividly being terrified every time the waiter at the restaurant approached our table, feeling very uncomfortable with the crowds at the coffee shop, and desperately wanting more than one cocktail at the bar to help me forget my anxieties. Cambodian Rock Band, for the record, was a stunning performance. Unfortunately, however, a packed theatre was not conducive to my forgetting about Covid-19, and I remained mentally and emotionally distracted throughout the performance. The entire day, I had to will myself to enjoy the day's events. Even after we left the theatre, which did help alleviate most of my anxiety, I did not feel fully comfortable until I was back home.
I remember arriving home and giving my parents a big hug. I had not seen them in two months, and it was an emotional reunion, perhaps more than it might otherwise have been if the pandemic had not been in the back of all of our minds. My parents were exhausted, but in decent spirits. “Tell you the truth,” Charles later explained while I was taking his oral history:
when I first got home I felt like I had dodged a bullet. Because, you know, we were out of that situation with the train, we were home by ourselves, we were in our own house, we just had somebody drop off food for us. I think we had, I think we had a, something for dessert dropped off for my birthday cause that was my, my 69th birthday was that day. And uh, it just felt good to be home and by ourselves and not surrounded by a lot of people that would increase the risk a lot. And we just kind of enjoyed the evening a little bit together.
I also felt glad to be home, especially as Manhattan is more crowded than any Floridian or Virginian train station. I wished my parents goodnight, not knowing exactly how the coming days would unfold. By the following Sunday, my parents and I were in full quarantine. I often describe our quarentine as being especially deep, as we did not leave the house for four months, not even to go to the supermarket. I remember going to my best friends' house that Sunday to just say hello and goodbye. The hug I gave them that evening, which I remember with shocking clarity, would be the last (non-parental) hug I would get for months.
In those first days following March 11th, my mother recalls that it finally felt real. “When the, the death toll started being announced,” she said, with obvious emotion in her eyes:
And, it, it just blew my mind as they were updating it, and then saying there's a possibility that we're gonna lose, I don't remember at the time, I think 60,000 people and I was like, OH MY GOSH 60,000 PEOPLE! As it turns out we've lost a lot more but... ...but when they started to announce death, death totals, that, then it got, I think it got REALLY real, for me, you know?
Life changed forever, especially for those who have lost loved ones.
For myself, the crisis felt as if it began in January. For my godmother, only after Broadway closed did she fully realize it would change her life. For my parents, they were first aware of the crisis sometime in between. March 11, 2020 may become the date middle school students study in some future history text book, but for those of us who lived through the early days of the Covid-19 crisis, no singular day is truly the “first”. In the words of my godmother, “it really seemed like a rolling series of things happening.”
ORAL HISTORIES (audio files available above):
-
Deborah Durand (conducted by Paul Orlowicz)
-
Conducted on 09/30/20
-
Elizabeth, New Jersey
-
-
Pamela and Charles Orlowicz (conducted by Paul Orlowicz)
-
Conducted on 10/01/20
-
Rutherford, New Jersey
-
-
Paul Orlowicz (conducted by Tyler Jaik Dylan)
-
Conducted on 10/02/20
-
East Rutherford, New Jersey
-