Items

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  2020-04

  Pandemic public bus

  Photo credit goes to the Coronavirus Chronicle Facebook page. The photo shows the locked front part of the MTA bus. This photo directly connects to my experience of taking buses during the surge of the Covid-19 pandemic in March and April 2020. I observed absolutely the same picture of the bus interior every single day on my daily trip to work. The front of the bus was purposely locked by crisscrossed chains and two safety belts. Hence passengers could not get on the bus in the front and the machine that took trip payment money and cards also were not available for public use. Passengers had a free ride throughout the pandemic on all NYC buses. MTA drivers avoided close airborne contact with other people to keep themselves safe and not lose their in-person work respectively. Such isolated buses reminded me of a post-apocalypse underground train in one of the parts of the Matrix film. Neo and his fellows had to hide from computer program agents that try to invade their shelter at the abandoned subway system.
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  March 2020

  Unprecedented wiped-out store shelves

  As I remember now, around mid of March 2020 my undergrad school pushed all students and faculty to an immediate break while college administration had figured out the transforming in-person classes into online ones. Meanwhile, I was thrown into a new reality of Covid19 lockdown in NYC. As a part of it, there were empty shelves in supermarkets and grocery stores. On the first days of the officially declared lockdown, supermarkets became rapidly overcrowded by New York residents who had to rush to buy essential food supplies that could be preserved for a long time. The atmosphere of common panic at the beginning of the pandemic and lockdown seemed to be everywhere in New York. Hence, supermarket shelves naturally turned to be aisles with wiped-out shelves. Besides the essential foods, toilet paper and disinfection items (sanitizers and wipes) also run out with the speed of light. During the lockdown times, I remember challenges in finding these sanitizing wipes and sanitizers in the stores which were extremely needed. I made a joke once in my conversation with a store employee that I would have a time machine to travel to the recent past and buy all needed things and return. Supermarkets’ management decided to limit the sales items to avoid the absolute lack of necessary products in their stores. I could never imagine seeing such a lack of necessary food products in an economically advanced country like the US. In contrast, today and in pre-Covid times I did regularly head to do shopping in supermarkets, and I was able to view fully packed shelves and fridges with all types of various foods and products.