First case of covid was reported while the I was still in Texas, it was horrifying and scary. People were extra careful how they interacted with others, always putting on masks and carrying on sanitizers with them. The shaking hands form of greeting was abolished and people just waved at you from a distance. People stayed indoors mostly and did not interact with other people. It was difficult to adopt this new form of greeting, I kept loosing it and ended up shaking hands with people only to realize too late.
The most worrying is for people who were abroad, and travelled into the state of Texas, they were treated as foreigners in their homes. Most were dragged to quarantine facilities under the instruction of their families. Ironical but it had to happen because of the fear of contracting COVID-19, some people choose to stay away from home to avoid this, those who came home had to accept that this is part of the rites of passage in order to be with your loved ones.
Here is a glimpse of the interview
The government kept going on and on about the measures to be taken to mitigate the situation, the measures included:
Wear Masks at all time
Avoid crowded places
Wash hands always and sanitize with alcohol-based sanitizer
Avoid touching your face with your hands
For the people who could they were advised to stay home and only get out of the house when it is necessary
Everyone had something to complain and worry about, people were scared and wondering how life is going to pan out the next day. How long was the virus going to take? Will we ever get a treatment for it? Will there be a vaccine some day? Of course because there were news of famous labs working on vaccines for the disease. The president blamed it on China, the people blamed on the first person to bring in the disease into the country, the doctors blamed the people for not adhering to the stipulated standards of COVID-19 preventions.
Every day new cases were reported, more and more, with increasingly more numbers than yesterday. Whenever a case was reported, the government with help of the hospital tried to do contact tracing to find out where the person contracted the disease from and if they had infected other people. Most of the searches were in no avail since despite trying hard not to interact with people, there was still infinite permutations of people you could interact with.
“The Biden administration has been releasing immigrants in South Texas that have been exposing Texans to Covid. Some of those people have been put on busses, taking that Covid to other states in the United States,” Abbott told CNBC. “That is Neanderthal-type approach to dealing with the Covid situation."
Life was hard, people lot jobs, people got paid half of their normal salaries in some companies, some workplaces stopped working. My job salary, luckily was not affected, but other things changed. The way to collect information without risking contraction was difficult, I and my colleagues had to adopt to the new way quickly. Despite the COVID news report still had to go on, we had to interact with people and collect information from them. We set up interviews with people, but with great precautions, asking our interviewees to wear masks, and did a temperature check to see if they had a spike in temperature. Luckily though, we never found someone in this condition.
Every day activities had to go on, after a while people realized they had to accept the new form of life, the government offered a funding called cares act, Coronavirus relief fund, FEMA and HOME funds adopted on March 2020 that directly support or could be used to support housing stability of Texas residents. Gradually normal activities resumed with noted laxity in people to follow the stipulated regulations thereby spiking the numbers to an alarming rate, people died and the ICU beds in hospitals were full, anxiety and fear started to loom all over.
