This document summarizes the experience of an individual during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Key events include: rapid spread of the virus globally after an initial outbreak in China, WHO declaring a global pandemic in March, widespread lockdowns and social distancing measures implemented, economic impacts as many jobs and businesses were affected, and lives being drastically changed as daily activities were restricted and people isolated at home for long periods. The document reflects on the fear, stress, and societal changes people experienced during this uncertain time.

1. 2020
January 1st 2020 marked the beginning of a new decade. The 2010’s were
officially over. A decade of rapid technological acceleration and total internet
connectivity had come to an end. On January 1st
2010, I was a depressed
teenager in high school trying to lose his virginity. On January 1st
2020, I was
a joyful adult trying to figure out how to help usher in some utopian future.
The possibilities for where I would be on January 1st
2030 were endless, and
almost certainly positive. It was all going to start with 2020. 2020 was going
to be an amazing year, I thought.
But 2020 did not get off to a good start. Only a few weeks into the year,
record-breaking wildfires in Australia killed millions of animals and turned
the skies red in Sydney. Basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old
daughter were killed in a tragic helicopter accident. And Donald Trump
A.K.A. Dumbfuck almost started World War 3 by insulting Iranian
government officials on Twitter. The news headlines felt like an endless
source of despair. I had to turn it off. I prayed for people in Australia and
hoped that the fires would go out, I prayed for Kobe Bryant’s family, and I
prayed that the people of the world weren’t dumb enough to start another
giant war. Outside of that, I tried to live my life as normally as possible. The
sad stuff on the news doesn’t affect my personal life, I thought.
Then the news found something else to talk about: a mysterious virus that
was spreading in Wuhan, China. They were calling it ‘Coronavirus’. I didn’t
think it was a big deal until I stumbled on a video online of a nurse in a
hospital in Wuhan. She looked both exhausted and terrified behind the pale
white face mask that covered her sweaty face. She said that the government
was severely under-reporting the severity of the outbreak. The official
statistics said that there were just over 9,000 confirmed infections, but she
intently asserted that there were many more than that in her hospital alone.
And apparently everybody who came to the hospital said their entire families
were getting sick too. The video made me mildly terrified. But for now, the
virus had barely spread outside of China. This wasn’t going to be a big deal, I
thought.

2. Things started getting more serious when the Chinese government put Wuhan
into a strict ‘lockdown’. Every single person in the entire city was forced to
stay in their homes for the next 8 weeks. People in apartment buildings were
confined to their units. Food and medicine were delivered to people’s homes
by the military. Soldiers were in the streets to ensure that everybody
complied with the lockdown. And travel in and out of the city was strictly
prohibited. It seemed a bit extreme. But if the virus had nowhere to spread, it
would disappear. This was the only way to prevent the infection from
spreading to the rest of China, I thought.
Then I stumbled on a website called Worldometer. It showed a rolling tally
of the number of confirmed infections and deaths caused by the Coronavirus
globally. The data was split by country and there were charts of trends over
time as well as links to all first-party data sources. As a data nerd greatly
concerned with the well-being of Humanity, it became my obsession. I
looked at Worldometer all day. At work, I had the page open and refreshed it
every 15 minutes to see if there were any changes. Unfortunately, the number
of confirmed cases and deaths were rapidly increasing in China. The Chinese
government began imposing lockdowns in cities all over the country,
eventually ordering hundreds of millions of people to stay in their homes.
Factories were shut down, schools and non-essential businesses were closed,
and the normally crowded streets of cities like Beijing were left completely
empty. But as much as I felt sorry for the Chinese people, I knew their
sacrifices would pay off. With all my intentions, I prayed that their diligence
could contain the virus. And my prayers were answered. After only 2 weeks
of lockdown, Worldometer was showing that infections in China were slowly
starting to take a turn for the better. The Chinese people were going to
successfully contain the virus, I thought.
My optimism was challenged again when new clusters of infections popped
up in Iran, South Korea, and Italy. My prayers weren’t working. The new
infection clusters kept growing. And more and more infections were being
found in all corners of the world linked with travel from China, Italy, and
Iran. People at my work couldn’t stop talking about it.
‘Did you hear about Italy? They found over 100 infections the other day’

3. ‘I heard a guy in Toronto was infected after coming back from Iran, then rode
on a subway full of people. Imagine how much he could have spread it?’
‘SARS lasted for 6 months back in 2003, hopefully this one will be gone by
the summer’
The weeks of bad news made my mental state start to decline. I was worried,
stressed, and anxious. Every time I thought things were getting better, they
got worse. China had successfully contained their outbreak with the
lockdown, but Italy and Iran didn’t act as quickly. The Italian people: known
for their cheek kisses, their warm family gatherings, and their passion for
being out and enjoying the pleasures of life, were not eager to be confined to
their homes. It was unfathomable. But by the first week of March, Italy was
reporting over 1,000 new infections per day, and over 100 deaths. Hospitals
in the northern regions were reportedly being flooded with patients showing
signs of respiratory distress, many of whom didn’t make it out of the hospital.
On March 9th
things had gotten so bad in the Italian hospitals, that the
government had no choice but to impose a lockdown like China did. The
warm, affectionate, and sociable Italian people were forced into confinement
in their homes. It was heartbreaking, but felt necessary as infections and
deaths still continued to rise. The vast majority of Italians were on board with
this temporary sacrifice.
Then, on March 11th
, the World Health Organization made the official
declaration. Coronavirus (which by then had officially been named COVID-
19) was declared a global pandemic. Infections were being reported in pretty
much every country in the world. Over 300 people were dying every day.
And new infection epicentres were emerging on every continent. It was sad.
But what happened in China gave me hope. All we needed to do to stop the
virus in its tracks, was to follow in China’s footsteps and impose a lockdown,
I thought.
*
People in Toronto were noticeably different in the days leading up to the
official declaration of the pandemic. Some people rode the crowded subway
wearing medical face masks and gloves, even though health officials said that
the risk for Canadians was very low. Health officials also made it clear the
face masks were not an effective way to protect yourself from catching the

4. virus and should be reserved for medical settings. But people were terrified,
and needed some type of a comfort blanket to make them feel better.
But something about when the WHO officially declared a pandemic was
when things started getting weird. My work sent an email to the entire staff
saying that we should prepare to work from home ‘for a few weeks’ until it
was safe for everybody to return to the office. On the news, there were live
broadcasts of politicians, ensuring everybody that if we all stayed home and
apart from each other, we could starve out the virus and end the epidemic like
China did.
I rushed to a grocery store after work to prepare for a few weeks of home
quarantine. When I got there, the parking lot was a war zone of angry drivers
fighting over scarce parking spaces. Thankfully, I was on foot and was able to
run into the store without dealing with that madness. But the inside of the
grocery store was an even bigger war zone. It was packed with people
scrambling in all directions. Some had carts overflowing with every item
imaginable, others had nothing except a panicked look on their face and an
empty basket. I grabbed the last remaining basket and rushed to the dry goods
aisle to pick up some non-perishable food. And for the first time in my life, I
saw empty shelves. There was no more pasta, no more rice, no more beans,
no more flour. The entire aisle was almost completely bare. My heart raced
with adrenaline when I realized that I didn’t have access to the food I needed.
Were we actually at risk of going hungry? Was this the apocalypse?
But for whatever reason, the real commotion was in the toilet paper aisle. The
shelves were totally empty and a crowd had gathered in front of it. 2 people
were yelling at each other over the last tiny package of 6 rolls.
‘I saw it first and you grabbed it as soon as I reached for it!’ The short
overweight woman with an expensive purse shouted
‘I grabbed it first, so it’s mine!’ Replied the older man wearing a business suit
Were people really this worked up over getting a bit of poop on their fingers?
Humans have existed for thousands of years without toilet paper. People have

5. washed themselves with clams, sponges, cloths, and a whole multitude of
other things before disposable toilet rolls were invented. People in 2020 had
access to all the hot water, disposable cloths, and soap that anybody needed
to keep their asses clean. Why was toilet paper a thing that people couldn’t
live without?
I managed to find myself a small bag of couscous, and a bag of dried green
lentils on the almost empty shelves of the dried goods aisle. I walked briskly
into the gigantic lineup and watched the 16-year-old girl behind the counter
on the verge of tears rushing to scan the customers through. The people in
front of the line had unreasonable amounts of toilet paper and mountains of
food in their shopping carts since they had gotten there first. Those of us in
the back of the line had whatever scraps were left.
There was a tremendous fear in everybody’s eyes. I saw one woman with a
cart overflowing with every food item you could think of and 3 mega packs
of toilet paper piled on top. She stared forward. Eyes wide with bags under
them from the evident lack of sleep. She drew the ire of others who envied
how full her pantry would be, and how clean her ass would be. But she didn’t
care, she was in her own little world. Her lips quivered as if she was holding
back tears, or screams, or both. She slowly passed in front of me and made
her way to the back of another line.
I tried being kind and patient in the midst of all the madness, pretending that
everything was fine. I let an old lady go ahead of me in line, I smiled and
thanked the grocery store worker profusely, and I pushed an abandoned
shopping cart in the parking lot to its designated area. Then I ran home as
quickly as I could. The WHO may as well have declared an apocalypse
based on how people were reacting.
Once I made it home, I turned on the news. Things were bad. Infections were
rising all over the world. Italy logged 197 virus deaths that day alone.
Enough bodies to fill a small auditorium, gone in a single day. As much as it
sucked dealing with washing my ass in the shower and being confined to my
home, at least I had my family. And we were okay. Family is what’s most

6. important, and lost family member can’t be replaced. We needed to make
sacrifices for the greater good.
We were all ready to spend the next few weeks in complete physical isolation
from all other human beings outside of our household. We were ready to
endure life without being close to friends, life without concerts, life without
restaurants, comedy shows, or nightclubs, and even life without haircuts. We
were ready to play our part in the eradication of this virus. Just a few weeks
of isolation to flatten the curve. Then we would follow in China’s footsteps
and gradually re-open once the virus had run its course, I thought.
*
It wasn’t exactly clear when the pandemic would be over., but based on how
well things were going in China the outlook was good. Thanks to their
lockdowns, the number of confirmed infections went from a peak of over
4,000 in mid February (likely a massive understatement), to the low 30s in
early March. Shopping malls were slowly re-opening, schools were back in
session, offices were slowly filling up with workers again. Life seemed to be
returning to normal in all of China’s biggest cities, except for Wuhan which
was still in lockdown for another 4 weeks. There was a dim light at the end of
the tunnel.
Outside of China, things were not looking so good. Hundreds of Italians were
dying each day and the small infection clusters that were found in the rest of
Europe were growing alarmingly fast. Every country in the world had
adopted some form of lockdown a few days after the official pandemic
declaration. And soon, the entire world was completely turned upside down.
Travellers all over the world were cutting their vacations short and being
rushed back home on rescue flights. All sports at all levels were cancelled.
Every performing artist from musicians, to dancers, to actors, to singers, to
comedians all had to cancel every single one of their upcoming performances
for the forseeable future. Every bar, restaurant, shopping centre, and
amusement park in the world was shut down. The whole world was coming
to a screeching halt.

7. Every night, while laying in my bed, I prayed hopelessly for all those who
were suffering. The nurses who had to work exhausting shifts. The families
who lost loved ones. The essential workers who kept putting their lives at risk
to keep the rest of us alive. The business owners who lost their incomes
overnight. And all those who were terrified and isolated in their homes like I
was. I couldn’t even find it within me to say ‘everything will be okay’ like I
had always been able to in the past. Because nothing felt like it was going to
be okay.
The advertising agency I was working for had told all 50,000 of their
employees worldwide to start working from home. Our conversations with
colleagues became limited to instant messaging and occasional video calls.
Every day for the first 2 weeks of the pandemic, the president of the company
gave speeches over a live video conference about how the company was
managing their way through the crisis. He discussed how we had clients in
industries that were thriving such as producers of cleaning supplies and
pharmaceutical companies. We had clients in industries that were badly
affected such as automotive and retail companies. And we had clients in
industries that were decimated such as airlines and travel companies. The
president assured us that our diverse portfolio of clients, and our willingness
to work hard and come together, were going to keep the company going.
At the end of the first conference call somebody asked when we were going
to go back into the office. He responded by showing us a photo of the
employees in the Chinese office in Shanghai. They were all wearing face
masks and holding celebratory glasses of wine in the air. Based on the shape
of their eyes, it seemed like they were smiling. How are they going to drink
wine with face masks on? I wondered.
The president commented in his eloquent British accent:
‘Thanks to their resilience, the staff in the Shanghai office are back after 6
weeks of working from home. Thanks to the lockdown, there are no active
infections in Shanghai and things are going back to normal. We expect a
similar outcome for the rest of our global workforce’

8. 6 weeks? Could the economy handle that? At this point, the economy felt like
it was spiralling towards collapse. Since everybody was forced to stay in their
home, except for essential workers, the only jobs left were the ones that could
be done from home, and essential ones. But for anybody who worked in
retail, hospitality, entertainment, travel, or anything else that required people
being outside their homes for a non-essential reason, their jobs were gone.
And even many of those who were working from home, their jobs were
dependent on people going out and selling goods and services. It was a
completely unprecedented economic situation that left most economists
confused as to what would come next. The stock market saw the fastest
decline in value since the 1980s, and global unemployment more than
quadrupled in a matter of weeks. There were record lineups at food banks,
shortages in every grocery store, and a massive disappearance of income all
over the world.
But what felt worse than the prospect of an economic collapse, was the fact
that the greatest joys in life were taken away. Life was already stressful
enough, but we could still vent our emotions with friends at a karaoke night,
or go out to a movie to forget about our problems, or go out and talk to
strangers at a bar. Now suddenly, we were in the most stressful time in our
lives without any outlets except The Tiger King on Netflix. Our days were
reduced to nothing but staying home and being glued to screens while
scrolling through terrifying news headlines about how we were living
through the apocalypse.
I felt particularly sorry for kids. They were taken out of school, had all their
activities cancelled, were locked inside, and couldn’t play with their friends
anymore. I remember as a camp counsellor being unable to get some kids to
sit still for 5 minutes. The thought of keeping a child stuck at home for 5
weeks (or more) seemed impossible.
One time, I was on a video conference with one of our key clients. As she
was discussing her thoughts on our work, her 5 year old son was literally
climbing on her, begging for attention. He kept saying ‘Mommy! Mommy!’
as she tried to ignore him to focus on the business proposal. Ignoring him
only made the boy yell louder. She eventually had to turn off her camera and

9. microphone for a few minutes, to come back with the door closed behind her
and the child gone. I could hear his faint screams coming from outside the
door. I can’t imagine anything more torturous for a child than keeping them
locked inside with nothing to do, then having them be completely ignored.
Hopefully this would be over soon.
The kids probably had no understanding of what was happening. One day
they were playing with their friends in school, perhaps noticing that their
parents were a bit stressed, but still deeply immersed the infinite joys of
childhood. The next day, they were stuck at home, being told that going
outside to play was dangerous, and that school was going to be done online
now. It’s not like you could just tell a kid ‘Look, since we don’t have access
to testing, we need to assume every single person is sick. If we can eliminate
all person to person contact in the community, we can bring the viral
reproductive number below 1 and eradicate the pandemic like China did’.
Although I was telling my friends that everything was going to be okay, I
wasn’t okay. I tried playing online video games with my friends in the
evenings, but I was so stressed that I couldn’t stop thinking about what was
happening. I had to quit in the middle of games to sit with my spiralling
thoughts and try to keep my anxiety under control. Were there going to be
food shortages? How long would it be before toilet paper was back in stock?
How are all these unemployed people going to feed themselves? What about
the kids whose parents are essential workers? How many more people were
going to die from this virus? When was this all going to end??
Then, as as the hospitals and funeral homes all over Europe were slowly
being overwhelmed, a new epicentre of the virus slowly emerged in the
greatest city on Earth: New York. It wasn’t surprising that New York City
would become the epicentre of a global pandemic. Millions of people coming
from all over the world crammed into a small area, constantly using public
transportation, forever navigating their way through thick crowds. All it took
was a few superspreaders on the subway to spread the infection throughout
the entire city. Most of the millions of office workers in Manhattan started
working from home in the days following the WHO declaration, but it took
another few days after that before the city that never sleeps finally went quiet.

10. By the end of March, there were hundreds of people being killed by the virus
every single day in New York City alone. The news showed footage of
massive grave sites being dug in the city, footage of hospital hallways with
patients lying on the ground due to shortages of beds, and footage of New
York governor Andrew Cuomo reporting the daily death tolls and continuing
to encourage New Yorkers to stay home. The once bustling streets of New
York City were empty for the first time ever.
The small glimmer of light, in possibly the city’s worst crisis ever, was the
nightly ‘Clap Because we Care’. Every night at 7PM, New Yorkers would go
to their windows or doorsteps with pots, pans, noisemakers, and as much
hopeful spirit as they could muster, to cheer on the frontline workers. They
cheered for the overworked nurses, the undervalued grocery store clerks, the
essential truck drivers, and most importantly, for each other. Because
everybody was suffering through the same thing. My friends who still lived
there participated every night. It was literally the only thing left to do in New
York since everything was shut down. Watching videos of it gave me
goosebumps. The human spirit is inextinguishable.
Since I still lived in the suburbs with my family, there weren’t any collective
claps I could participate in. The only thing that kept me sane was aimless
walks in the local park. By the beginning of April spring was slowly coming
into bloom. The leaves were beginning to form buds on the branches that had
been barren all winter. The warm spring sun that was starting to shine and
bring temperatures to where I only needed a light sweater. Every time I
stepped out of the house I took deep inhales of the fresh air that was starting
to feel like more and more of a luxury. Whenever I encountered another
person outside, we both made sure to walk at least 6 feet (or 2 metres) away
from each other to respect social distancing. Eliminating all human contact
was the key to eradicating the pandemic.
I saw a meme that said ‘2020 is a unique year. January had 31 days, February
had 29 days, and March had 147 days’. Nothing had ever felt more true
before. Time was standing still. By the end of March, our lives had
completely changed. Weekends didn’t feel like weekends anymore, the
streets of the world’s biggest cities were still empty, and almost everything

11. we filled our time with was taken away. I woke up every day and felt like I
was living in a dream. And I wasn’t alone. Literally every person on Earth
was affected by what was happening. And the virus kept spreading further
and further. But in Wuhan, after 8 weeks of lockdown, there were no more
active cases. Everything was allowed to re-open at the scheduled end date of
the lockdown. People were slowly resuming their normal lives. It gave me
hope. Only a few more weeks of lockdown and we would follow in Wuhan’s
footsteps and come out to the other side of this crisis, I thought.
*
After a few weeks of watching the world around me go to shit, I began to feel
restless. Thousands of people were dying every day, tens of millions of
people were still left without incomes, depression, domestic abuse, anxiety
and hopelessness were all massively on the rise. Meanwhile, I was spending
the majority of time sitting at the dinner table behind a computer trying to
find ways to manipulate people into buying BMWs. Every day that passed I
kept losing my will to give a shit about my job. I was living through the
greatest crisis of my lifetime. And my only contribution was to sit behind a
computer all day?
Everybody wanted to help in some way, but most people had no idea what to
do. Hollywood celebrities responded in exactly the way you would expect
from an industry run by pathological narcissists. Gal Gadot, star of the
popular Wonder Woman franchise, got a bunch of her celebrity friends
together to sing John Lennon’s classic song ‘Imagine’. The inputs from the
various celebrities were strung together into a compilation and shared on the
internet in a video titled ‘Celebrities sing beautiful Imagine cover amid
coronavirus crisis’, except it wasn’t beautiful.
Most of them weren’t even professional singers so it was painfully off-key
and out of tune. But that wasn’t what made it so bad. There was something
icky about a bunch of rich and famous people trying to seem relevant by
patronizingly serenading the masses who had just lost their jobs and pretty
much everything that gave them joy in life. They tried to make the viewers

12. feel like ‘We’re all in this together’ but really, they made the viewers feel like
‘We’re better than you. Please give us your attention again’.
I made note not to do any poorly sung covers of Beatles songs. But what
could I do? I was contributing to slowing down the spread of the virus by
social distancing, that was the easy part. But it wasn’t enough. The spread of
the virus was only one of the many problems that were plaguing the world.
My family and I went out of our way to spend as much money as we could to
support local restaurants. But that still didn’t feel like enough. So I found a
group on Facebook where people that were desperately in need of help were
seeking it. Jackpot.
I first offered to buy groceries for anybody who had lost their jobs. I got a
few responses and rushed out to the grocery store to pick stuff up. I waited in
line outside and stayed socially distanced from all other customers while in
the store. I picked up the items they had requested, and wiped them down
with Lysol disinfecting wipes before delivering them as an extra precaution. I
watched from a distance as people’s faces lit up with joy when they saw the
bag of groceries waiting for them outside their apartment buildings. They
waved at me while I sat in the car and waved back from a safe distance. I
wished I could hug them, but hugs had to wait.
I became addicted to helping people, so I got involved with more charities. I
started by delivering Easter packages to low income families all over the city
and watched the poor isolated children smile when they opened a bag full of
candy. One mother sent me a text message after dropping off her package
‘Thank you so much for what you are doing’
‘No problem. Stay positive and stay strong’
‘We are struggling, but we are trying. Thank you.’
I eventually stumbled on a charity that was doing even heavier lifting. They
were called Hand Up Toronto. It was run by a bunch of volunteers that had
successful careers in finance and business. They had a list of over 25,000

13. families that were in need of emergency food supplies. I spoke with one of
the organizers who said they were struggling to meet the high demand, and
offered my assistance.
I joined the executive committee and we came together with strategies to
maximize food distribution given our constraints. We had a huge budget, a
huge database of volunteers, and a massive list of families that needed food.
All we needed was a plan. We had virtual meetings almost every day where
we came up with strategies for how we were going to tackle the food
insecurity problem.
Things started with only a few dozen volunteers working at various locations
where families would come to pick up the food. Then we used software tools
to build optimized delivery routes to distribute food to thousands of families
using hundreds of volunteer drivers every week. We raised money through
donations, improved the quality of the food we delivered, and grew our
distribution to its maximum capacity as soon as possible. This was what I
needed. Somewhere to channel my time and energy to meaningfully address
the problems caused by this pandemic and the subsequent economic
shutdowns.
My optimism was slowly coming back, so I felt the need to share it. My next
project was writing a blog about how Buddhist concepts could be applied to
give mental and emotional strength even in the most difficult situations. I
worked on it every night, shared it with friends and family, and eventually
published it online. I got good feedback from a few people who read it, but it
ultimately accomplished very little in alleviating the stress that the world was
feeling. It was just a small drop of hope in an ocean of misery.
By the end of April, things were still not looking great. There were tens of
thousands of infections being reported daily worldwide, and over 6,000
people dying. In February, there’s no way we could have anticipated that
things would have gotten this bad. Over 250,000 people had been killed by
the virus. The joys of travel were starting to feel like a distant memory. All
my favourite small businesses were on the verge of collapse. And billions of
people all over the world had been traumatized, terrified, and stressed more

14. than they ever had before. But the infection numbers were steadily decreasing
in most places. The virus was slowly moving behind us and the worst of it
was over, I thought.