This is part of a series of posts chronicling the Coronavirus / Covid19 outbreak in New York City as seen by me, a father husband and lawyer living in Brooklyn. See them all on the main Corona Diaries page.
March 16, 2020
This is a crazy, crazy, crazy anxiety producing time.
We’re in lockdown mode here at home. I had to go into the office today, but that was the last time in a long, long time, most likely. Rode my bike over the Brooklyn Bridge, normally crowded with tourists, but today empty except for a smattering of bike comuters. The souvenir guys were out, but with no one to sell to. I feel for them.
Went to work today thinking we had most everything solved. That night our staff were no longer going to be in the courts and there would no new supervised release intakes. Soon after, we learned that SR would be moving to a phone based check ins.
But then everything went sideways.
In the span of an hour we learned that one of our clients had been admitted to the hospital with a likely case of Covid19, and the cousin of another coworker had died of the virus.
Boom. Everything changes.
We close the supervised release office and send everyone home. We tell the landlord, even though we might loose our lease.
This is life during a pandemic,
But we think we have it under control, there’s an almost jocular atmosphere around the line staff — soon they too are all going to be going home.
But then, at 4pm, we learn our staff need to stay in the courts would have to stay until the end of the day Tuesday.
So we scramble again and our incredible staff step up, again, and miraculously, we cover it.
Meanwhile, E is at home with the kids. They have been angels, she says, and I believe her. We have a new sitter here who is wonderful, and great with the kids, but towards the end of the day, everyone, kids and adults, are getting ratty.
Then we get word from the school that two families with kids in the school have someone who has been diagnosed. Unclear if it’s grandparents or someone else — it isn’t kids — but that’s another vector. We’re going to get it, the question is when, and how bad.
We decide that after a single day, we’re not having the sitter back. Too risky to expose someone else to us, and us to someone else. It will be just the four of us starting tomorrow.
From here on out, I’m going to be juggling kids distance learning and work. In my downtime, such as it is, I plan to meditate, journal, read and exercise. I plan to not spend too much time on twitter or following the news with the kind of minute by minute focus I usually do. The big things will come to me naturally, perhaps I don’t need to know the rest.
