108 A Student’s Recollection of Covid
Anonymous
For the duration of the Covid outbreak I was in my family house here in Hamilton, Ontario. I was 15 years old and was in grade 10, just starting out March break when things started to kick into gear and the world flipped upside down.
Me and my family were in what I can only describe as the closest thing to a full lockdown for more than a year. What little time we did go outside on walks was plagued with an awkward two meters between each of us and a faint yet constant feeling of dread that we were somehow doing something illegal and were going to get caught out on it, although we never did. The day-to-day changes were extreme. Instead of waking up early in the morning to brush my teeth, eat some breakfast, and occasionally shower (every other day) I found myself barely being able to pull myself out of bed to log into my online classes – not to pay any attention but purely for attendance. While in the past I found myself outside with friends for most of the spring and summer months soaking in the warm weather and trying to find something interesting to pass the hours, that bliss morphed into spending a majority of my days staring at the computer scrolling through endless pages of the web hoping to find at least any form of slight entertainment before I inevitably got bored and moved onto the next. All organized sports were cancelled – regular things that kept me healthy like hockey and soccer practice were a thing of the past. I started forming a gut, my hair got long and greasy, and pimples started to infest my body, but I didn’t care because who was there for me to impress? One small upside to the whole ordeal was my family bond grew significantly as instead of shying away from one another we became much closer than ever before, making sure to do things like play board games or watch a movie together at least once a week.
The hardest thing by far during the duration of Covid was not being able to visit my grandmother in her nursing home. At first, we were able to drive up to the parking lot at scheduled times to wave at her and say some word of encouragement, but soon even that was stopped due to the worry of any spreading. Right before Covid started her dementia started to get bad, and we tried to go see her as often as possible as she got confused and agitated easily. Once Covid started and we heard about how bad places like nursing homes had gotten, essentially Covid breeding-grounds with infection and fatality rates through the roof, we became extremely worried for her wellbeing. Thankfully, she was able to weather that storm and we were able to spend a few more real years with her afterwards before she passed. A good thing that came out of Covid for me was that I really think it improved my mental capabilities and how I deal with stress. I had so much time on my hands that I actually would stop to smell the flowers, or stare at a ladybug crawling around on my window, and these small things were really able to keep me grounded and realize the world would keep turning no matter how bad things seemed right now. These mechanisms are now something that are an integral part of my everyday life, and without them I truly believe I would have been a much more cynical person overall once Covid restrictions finally ended.
Virtual schooling taught me that I absolutely have to be person–to–person in a learning environment if I want it to count, as I cannot trust myself to not use distractions if left to my own discretion. Once things turned online, it didn’t take very long for me to basically stop paying attention to any class that bore me in the slightest. In things like math and science I fell severely behind, with illusionary competence. It was masked from my parents only by the fact that grades couldn’t drop any lower than what you had before lockdown. I also developed extreme ADHD mechanisms like bouncing my leg continuously and having to check my phone exceedingly often, things that I still struggle with. I know for a fact that there is a significant knowledge gap for most students who went through these online classes at all levels of the school system, many of whom never took the time to truly relearn all that they missed. For me it was trigonometry and organic chemistry, but for someone much younger it could be elementary building blocks of knowledge like multiplication and addition which is incredibly sad and scary to think about.
A class theme that I think depicts the Covid experience in a perfectly dangerous way is isolation. For a moment in time, it felt like everyone in the entire world was isolated from one another in their own little bubbles of houses, apartments, bungalows, and anything else. The worst part about that sort of isolation was that it could and would get even worse. During one of my family’s regular Covid self-checkups, the dreaded double red line appeared on my test. Even when I already felt so isolated and only had my family to talk with, I had to sacrifice even that small consolation as my bubble of a house turned into a bubble of just my room for over two weeks. I don’t think it is talked about nearly enough just how psychologically damaging Covid was to people who experienced it and the long–lasting effects it has had on society. In the future when scientists study Covid – like how we today are lucky enough to study viruses of the past – I hope there is enough information left behind for them to seriously take a look at things beyond just quantitative information like death tolls and really dive deep into the qualitative aspects that monumentally suffered as a result too.
