Linda is a 76 year old retired healthcare worker, mother and grandmother. She first heard about Covid from the news while it was only spreading in China. She discusses how by her age flu variants don’t worry her as much because she’s already had most of them. The problem is, because Covid-19 is a brand new laboratory made virus she knows her body would struggle to fight it off. This also means that when cases started popping up in America, Linda was quick to put herself in quarantine. She overall feels the pandemic has helped her gain patience after staying stuffed in her house for nearly a year and only leaving for groceries. Although instead of finding freedom in her small trips out of the house, she found herself terrified of everyone around her. Linda discussed that during the beginning of quarantine grocery trips were extremely frightening for her. She felt that anything and everything she touched would give her the disease. It wasn’t until much later when she learned that the virus usually traveled through the air rather than through items that she felt even slightly comfortable in stores.
In the end Linda is most concerned about how little the world was prepared for something like this to happen. It makes her wonder what other devastating catastrophes there could be that the public again won’t be prepared for. It worries her the most that the public wasn’t able to come together for a cause, especially when coming together would benefit everyone. Linda ends the interview by putting things into a different perspective, she throws out that in a perfect world if everyone genuinely would have stayed at home without grocery shopping or visiting anyone for exactly 10 days Covid would be completely gone. She acknowledges that it would be impossible to not have any emergencies but also understands that many could have done more to stop the spread.
MIPandemicStory 