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A Bet
On March 10, 2020, I lost a bet. I had organized a loose group of Rutgers-Newark instructors to go in on a pool – for bragging rights only – about when Rutgers University would close the three campuses due to the coronavirus threat. We all received an email in the mid-afternoon on March 10 that Rutgers was cancelling classes as of Thursday March 12 and, after Spring Break, moving online for two weeks as of March 23. The pool was a light-hearted way to process uncertainty and budding grief about a world we were about to lose. What sticks out in my mind nearly seven months later, however, is how most got involved in this pool. I ran into various colleagues in indoor hallways at Rutgers, with nobody wearing masks or social distancing, and, while chatting, I cajoled them to name a date. Such carefree interactions, even if against a looming darkness, are, for now, a relic of the past.
A Dinner
On March 11, 2020, I went to a pre-conference dinner held on campus at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. There were about 15 of us present, fewer than originally planned. Our numbers were reduced because some attendees had their flights cancelled and so could not attend. Also, we were complying with new rules, just instituted by Rutgers, that capped the number of people who could gather together on campus.
Upon arriving at the dinner, nobody wanted to shake hands. How do you greet people professionally, in Western contexts, without shaking hands? One of the last attendees to arrive put out her hand for me to shake, and I almost did so before jerking back my hand. So awkward. After dinner, it came out that one of the people present was a medical doctor, and so we all surrounded him and began bombarding him with questions. Will the pandemic really be that bad? What’s going to change in hospitals? Should we pull our kids out of school? Why is there no testing available? What can we do to protect ourselves?
A Conference
On March 12, 2020, I attended and spoke at a conference on Islamophobia at Rutgers-New Brunswick. We had anticipated a large crowd and so were holding the event in a cavernous auditorium with hundreds of seats. But now that the pandemic was on, we proceeded sans audience and livestreamed it. There were never more than about twenty of us in a room that could seat 500. I had given a lot of talks in my academic career to sparsely populated rooms, but never one quite as large and quite as empty as this one.
One of my co-panelists emailed us before he came to the conference saying that one of his kids was sick with a cold, but that he could not imagine it was coronavirus and so would attend the conference anyways. I found this exchange odd at the time, both that my colleague would bother to mention a child’s runny nose and that I felt slightly uneasy about it. Later I came to see how his email represented a transitional moment, where the just-declared pandemic had changed us enough that you would bother to disclose that your kid had a daycare cold but we had not yet reached the point where such symptoms meant you stayed home. We all had lunch together at the conference, in a small room, indoors.
While at the conference, I kept up on coronavirus news on my phone. My husband sent me this photo from our local Trader Joe’s grocery story, taken around 5 p.m. on March 12, 2020 that depicted bare shelves.
Writing that evening, I closed my journal entry for March 12, with this:
News is coming fast and furious on COVID-19. Time of uncertainty and fear. It is a scandal that the US had so little testing and the resulting ignorance is fuelling fear.