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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
I'm joining this project fairly late (Feb. 28, 2021). My wife and I began quarantining in mid-March 2020, and we worked from home thereafter. I got into the habit of taking photos of pandemic-related scenes on our daily walks near our home in downtown Albany, NY. Then, in the summer, I included photos related to Black Lives Matter and other political issues. I'm grateful for the chance to share these photos. I'm a historian at SUNY Albany and I think this project will be very important for later researchers. This is a photo from early May 2020. It shows the front stoop of a downtown Albany rowhouse. One of the striking things for me, early in the pandemic, was the strong sense of solidarity and encouragement many people displayed. At the same time when people had to isolate from each other. Nearly a year into the pandemic, some of that solidarity and encouragement remain, but a lot of people are also getting tired of restrictions like masking.
March 1, 2021
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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
England has now officially come out of the one month lockdown it was in, but my county (Kent) is in the ‘Tier’ that denotes the highest level of precaution must still be taken - tier 3. This means that the last week of the semester, which was supposed to be in person classes, has to be online after all. I am going home in one week. The government has offered a travel window where university students were preferred to go home between the 3rd-9th of December but I am not going until the 11th as I had already booked a ticket that was non refundable and anyway if I had had to buy a ticket within this window of dates it would be £130 rather than £30 which is just too much of a difference. But even though I am going home a little bit after the window, it still leaves me two weeks to quarantine at home and then hopefully I will be fine to see my grandparents on Christmas as the one other family you can spend it with. Technically up to three households can unite for Christmas but this year for the first time in a decade we are keeping it small with just my parents, brother, me and my grandparents (who my parents are the carers for anyway). I am looking forward to a small Christmas. Last year we had a big one including a family friend who brought her very excitable and non-litter trained poodles. It nearly caused a big fight because my dad doesn’t like dogs and was furious the friend wouldn’t take them out enough to stop them excreting inside. Maybe it sounds bad but lockdown measures have been a convenient excuse to not be able to invite lots of people to Christmas as we would normally feel pressured to do. I think my dad in particular will have a lot happier of a time this year and get the Christmas he really wants.
December 9, 2020