Kenneth Morrissey

A Graduate Students Perspective on the First Days of the Coronavirus Pandemic

March 11-12

            Before the coronavirus came to the United States of America, I did not take the virus all that seriously. I remember from my youth there were a number of other disease “panics” every so often. But at least from my personal perspective, it always seemed as if all the worry was completely for naught. Even though I knew that these diseases were infecting some people in my home country, they never really impacted my life in any meaningful way. When I first heard about the virus in China, I assumed it would be the same as all the other past disease panics. I was sure that some people in America would be infected by COVID-19 and the media would make a big deal about it, but I thought that the virus would pass without much incident in a couple of months.  In fact, I was so sure that the virus would not amount to much that I even made jokes about the coronavirus to some of my friends. I remember one of the jokes started off when I overheard one of my friends talking about how one of their family members was worried about their sick child. In order to lighten the mood, I quickly quipped “He obviously has the coronavirus” and the room burst out laughing. The child of course obviously did not have COVID, since this was way before the virus landed in America, so we could all laugh assured that everything with the child would be fine. I still find that moment funny today, but more in ironic way than the joke was originally intended to be taken. This is all to say, in early March of 2020, I would have never imagined the coronavirus would have impacted my life as much as it has over the last six months.

           My perception on the coronavirus completely changed when I heard the players on the Utah Jazz had contracted the virus in early March of 2020. The memory of the opening of the Utah Jazz and Oklahoma City Thunder basketball game on March 11^th, 2020 is still burned in my mind. The pre-game started off just like any other during the NBA regular season. The players were warming up on the court, the commentators were breaking down what each team needed to do to win, and the fans were getting excited for the upcoming game. But slowly but surely, you could tell that something was wrong in Chespeake Energy Arena. The player and coaches were suspiciously talking to the referees, the commentators had a confused tone in their voice, and Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert was out from the game with a mystery unnamed illness. Then after what was supposed to be a “short delay,” the players left the court and the PA announcer told the audience that the game was cancelled. It then came out the following day that star players on the Utah Jazz Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell had contracted COVID-19. People, myself sometimes included, often think of celebrities and athletes as super humans who are immune from things like diseases. When a celebrity does come down with a disease, especially ones as popular as Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell, it lets the public know that the disease is something to be reckoned with. Once I saw this happen, I knew that my life was going to be dramatically changed for the foreseeable future.

            The very next day, on March 12^th, I had my usually scheduled appointment with my counselor. Before I started with the counselor I am with now, I was in a really dark place in my life. These regularly scheduled meetings helped add some much needed normally and routine to my weekly schedule. But there was something a little bit out of the ordinary about this week’s visit. On the secretary’s desk where I normally signed in, there was little bottle of hand sanitizer. The secretary, who had obviously heard about the newly named pandemic, motioned for me to use the hand sanitizer. This in and of itself was not that big of a hassle for me, after all it only took five seconds of my time, but it represented the first of many changes in my life. That visit was actually the last time that I saw my councilor in person, even to this very day. A lot of the places that I used to frequent followed their temporarily shut down, which meant I had almost nowhere to go so that I could socialize with my friends. And perhaps worst of all, I became afraid to go outside, even for the simplest of things. The pandemic and my fear of it had essentially destroyed the careful schedule that I had planned out for myself.

            The current coronavirus pandemic should serve as a forewarning for how to handle future potential disease pandemics. Many people, including myself, did not take the early days of the pandemic seriously enough. There was a very popular mindset early on during the pandemic that life should just go on as normal. I still remember seeing photos of people crowding beaches in Florida like nothing was wrong at all. This mindset created the perfect situation for the virus to thrive. Thanks to medical and scientific research, the general public now knows of easy steps that they can take in order to stop the spread of future potential infectious diseases like the coronavirus, like social distancing and wearing a mask. Whenever we learn of potential infectious diseases spreading to America in the future, we must make sure that we take these preventative steps from the very beginning, in order to prevent the situation from getting as bad as the current coronavirus pandemic. I know for certain that I will never be laughing at a disease like COVID-19 ever again.

A Registered Nurse’s Perspective on the First Days of the Coronavirus Pandemic

            I interviewed a registered nurse in order to get the perspective of someone in the medical field on the coronavirus. Experts on infectious diseases Nasim Lotfinejad, Alexandra Peters, and Didier Pittet wrote Hand hygiene and the novel coronavirus pandemic: the role of healthcare workers about the difficulties of being a nurse during the pandemic, “Their frequent exposure to pathogens, long working hours, stressful work environment and fatigue predispose them to acquire or transmit infections such as COVID-19.” (Lotfinejad, Peters, and Pittet 776) Due to the nature of their jobs, nurses are put at extreme risk of catching infectious diseases like COVID-19. But yet, their jobs are essential for any society to overcome the pandemic., I wanted to tell the story of someone who had to put so much on the line just to do their job and help people. The nurse that I choose to interview, who choose to remain anonymous, is a fifty seven year old woman who lives in central New Jersey. She has spent the past thirty-five years in active practice as a registered nurse. She has worked twenty-eight years in a hospital, five years teaching nurses, and the past two years in a private medical manufacturing company. Even though she no longer works in a hospital, she is still at risk of catching COVID-19 through her interactions with people who come in to donate blood. Her experiences and perspectives on the pandemic are invaluable for our understanding of how the wider public is dealing with this deadly disease.

            The very first thing that I asked this registered nurse was her initial reaction to the COVID-19. She told me that, as a medical professional, she was aware of the virus from almost the very beginning. Before the COVID-19 virus came to America, she thought that the virus would be able to be contained by the United States’ government. She compared COVID-19 dismissively to past disease “panics” such as SARs and Ebola. She and I displayed an attitude toward COVID-19 during the first days of the pandemic that historian David S. Jones argues in COVID‐19, History, and Humility helped the virus spread. He specifically wrote, “…too many people in too many countries were content to downplay the threat until it was too late…we now grapple with the consequences of our complacency and wonder how it will all end.” (Jones 372) As there has not been a pandemic of this magnitude since the Spanish Flu which occurred nearly one hundred years ago, people did not know just how severe COVID-19’s effects would be on the country. Many assumed, such as this registered nurse and her interviewer, that it would pass through the United States without much incident due to prior disease panics. As Jones described, this complacency ultimately created the conditions where the virus thrived. When we finally did grasp the severity of the COVID-19 virus, the virus had already affected hundreds of thousands in America.

            As a medical professional, I thought it would be important to ask her what precautions she and her medical manufacturing company took during the early days of the pandemic to prevent the spread of COVID-19 amongst staff and customers. Lotfinejad, Peters, and Pittet wrote that, “Most healthcare-acquired infections could be avoided by well-trained nurses with appropriate hand hygiene compliance and use of protective equipment.” (Lotfinejad, Peters, and Pittet 776) Through the use of protective gear, it is possible for nurses and other health professionals to prevent the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19. Before the pandemic, at this registered nurse’s job they would normally wear a white lab coat, plastic gloves, and a clear face shield for hygienic reasons. When the virus was first declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, her superiors gathered all employees and told them that the personal protective equipment that they were already wearing would be sufficient to protect them from the virus. About a month after the virus was declared a pandemic, a couple of people working at her job in their early twenties had become sick with the virus. This development worried the registered nurse, as she was an older woman and knew the risks that the virus presented to someone her age. As an extra precautionary measure, her job has since required her to wear an N-95 mask in addition to all of the normal required gear when dealing with customers. This registered nurse’s experiences show that everyone’s understanding of the protective measures needed to prevent the spread of COVID-19 has evolved since the beginning of the pandemic.

           In order to close things out, I asked the registered nurse about her overall thoughts about the coronavirus pandemic. She seemed flabbergasted at all that had happened since those first days of the pandemic. In order to illustrate her feelings, she compared her experience during the pandemic to the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack.  She said during the attack, she was very afraid, but her life more or less returned to normal during the next couple of days. Whereas with the pandemic, she had to alter the very ways in which she lived her life. She expressed extreme frustration that she had difficulty getting something as simple as groceries from her local convenience store. The frustration that this registered nurse is experiencing is something that many people from all around the world are feeling right now. Beckie Supiano gives a good summary of this feeling in Why Is Zoom So Exhausting?, “…so many people want to project to others that they’re doing business as usual, even while the news is full of “images of death, of illness, of economic downturn and collapse.””(Supiano 7) Many people just want things to return to the version of “normal” that they had before the pandemic. The general public will certainly remember this feeling of frustration for a very long time. Maybe that memory of frustration will motivate the public to take the next potential pandemic more seriously right from the very beginning, so that pandemic never get nearly as severe as the current coronavirus pandemic. But this visage of the future can only occur can only occur if people take the right lessons from the first days of the coronavirus pandemic.

This interview was conducted in person and recorded on an iPad and iPhone on October 2^nd, 2020.

Transcript of Interview: https://archivingcovid19.libraries.rutgers.edu/admin/items/show/39

Work Cited

Jones DS. COVID‐19, “History, and Humility. Centaurus.” 2020;62(2):370-380. doi:10.1111/1600-0498.12296

Lotfinejad N, Peters A, Pittet D. “Hand Hygiene and the Novel Coronavirus Pandemic: The Role of Healthcare Workers.” The Journal of hospital infection. 2020;105(4):776-777. doi:10.1016/j.jhin.2020.03.017

Morrissey, Kenneth F, and a Registered Nurse. “Interview of a Registered Nurse about the Early Days of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” 2 Oct. 2020.

Supiano, Beckie. “Why Is Zoom So Exhausting?” Chronicle.com, The Chronicle of Education, 22 July 2020, www.chronicle.com/article/why-is-zoom-so-exhausting/.