36 Covid: A Wrinkle in Time
Anonymous
When Covid lockdown fully began, it was the end of February 2020, I was 15 years old, living and going to school in Toronto, and just about halfway through Grade 10. My last memory of life before the lockdowns and restrictions began was at my high school semi-formal, which happened on the last Friday before the “two-week break” that turned into years.
My Covid experience is hard for me to remember. It feels like a blip of time so trying to remember specific things is difficult, but from what I can remember, we did go into full lockdown for about a year broken up throughout 2020 to 2021. When I say full lockdown, I mean that school was closed, and my entire family was home as places of business were also shut down. There were sometimes throughout 2020-2022 when restrictions were lifted, but the school year from September 2020 to July 2021 was completely online the entire year, so all students were home. I don’t remember much from online schools other than teachers constantly telling students to turn their cameras on and the awkward silence that would follow the teacher asking a question and no one answering. Another aspect of my life that became virtual was my dance classes. When the lockdown began in March, we had been in the process of rehearsing for the big recital that was supposed to be held in May. I was so upset because I had been so excited to be a part of the ensemble, and then we had to hold it online by recording ourselves performing our dances through Zoom. Another staple of my Covid lockdown experience was that I would insist on my dad taking me for drives in his car downtown. Since everyone was locked inside, downtown was a ghost town which was very eerie because it is normally extremely busy and full of life.
When the pandemic initially started, there was for some reason, a huge panic that people would run out of things, specifically toilet paper, so people went crazy and started stacking up on essentials. The news loved to show pictures of the empty shelves in grocery stores. Another thing that most people probably had a large collection of was the Covid-19 Rapid Antigen Testing Kit. They came in these little green boxes and were handed out at a lot of places. To do the test you had to stick the long Q-tip, that came in the kit, up your nose and swab the inside of your nose, then mix with the reagent, drop the mixture onto the test, and then wait a few minutes to see if it was positive or negative.
Another staple of the Covid lockdown experience was TikTok. TikTok blew up during lockdown; it was the preferred form of media for young people. It was good because there was something for everyone, and you could find things you liked or really connected with. I was on the side of TikTok that was all about books, called Booktok, as I had really gotten into reading over lockdown. Another way people connected during lockdown, specifically younger people, was through playing games online with friends. Among Us was a popular one, the premise was that one person was the bad guy and you and your friends would try to find and vote out whichever one of you was the traitor.
Something that became much more common over Covid was the frequency with which people were ordering groceries and other things online. Another common practice was always having a mask or two in your pocket or purse, as they were required whenever you went indoors, and many people wore them in general when walking outside as well. In late 2021 until the middle of 2022, it also became normal to have to show proof of vaccination when entering places like movie theatres, restaurants, and other places that could hold a lot of people. After school began in person again in September 2021, students were required to wear masks all the time and every morning we had to complete a self-screening report. There would be a Vice Principal at the entrance of the school every morning to check that our self-screening was done before we were allowed to come into the school.
Today, there are still remnants of the changes that occurred during Covid. Three years after the pandemic finished, the “SIX FEET APART” signs that were put up everywhere and painted on the sidewalks can still be seen. Also, a lot of chain stores and grocery stores implemented self-checkout during Covid, which is still used today. When Covid “ended,” or once things felt kind of back to normal, it was around Spring 2022, which was the end of my Grade 12 year and I was 17. So, Covid had a strong impact on my high school experience.
None of my memories of high school have me looking back with intense fondness and nostalgia. The blip that Covid caused did not make high school feel like it impacted my life in a large way. Compared to how high school is normally supposed to go, I feel as though students in my year and in that same sort of age group were robbed of an actual high school experience. The lasting memories you are supposed to form and the ways you are supposed to grow up in high school did not really have the chance to occur until the last semester of Grade 12 when things had sort of started to go back to normal.
Blame is a course theme that I feel was seen a lot during Covid. Specifically, there was a lot of Asian hate perpetuated at the time. The increase in racism at this time started because the first identified case of coronavirus was in Wuhan, China, and people love to look for someone to blame. This mentality was not helped by people like Donald Trump who called Covid-19 the “China-virus” during press conferences. The news reported an increase in verbal attacks, graffiti on businesses in Asian communities, and even physical assaults. I remember seeing this kind of hatred perpetuating and seeing things like graffiti with slurs written on the sidewalk, posts on social media speculating about if China created the virus on purpose, and all the reported incidents on the news. This kind of hatred is something that we have seen throughout the course as a common side effect to plagues or disease. When something goes wrong, the first thing people do is look for someone to blame.
