Co-vid 19 ~ A Global Pandemic

At the beginning of 2020, we started hearing about the coronavirus affecting China. The virus was spreading fast and people were sick and dying. They had shut down the country.

Then a few cases started spreading throughout the world. Now it's in the United States. Now it's in Canada.

March 11. Utah State University announces that all club sports are cancelled, including college rodeo. Hanna emailed the president of USU and requested that they still allow the rodeo team to compete at that weekend's rodeo. She was so responsive and wrote back and forth to her late into the night.

March 12. We are driving to Lethbridge to watch the high school basketball zones. We hear on the radio that the Chief Medical Officer has announced that all gatherings of more than 250 people have been cancelled. Then they cancelled the games. The girls team was warming up, and they cancelled the games. We went to Wendy's for dinner since we were already in Lethbridge. Then I went to buy groceries at Costco along with the rest of southern Alberta - since we were already in town and who knows what the future will bring. Toilet paper was already sold out.

March 13 - Significant snow blizzard so they cancelled school

March 15 - Sunday night. School is cancelled in Alberta.

Then each day something else was cancelled or closed:

Church

Temples

Rodeos

Olympics

Professional Sports

US/Canada border

Non-essential businesses

Then they started sending all of the missionaries home from the affected countries. South America, Africa, Philippines, etc. Any missionary who had any listed medical problems also got sent home. These missionaries were all temporarily released and then reassigned in their home countries a few weeks later. The majority of them were so sad to be ripped from the people they serve.

What a crazy world.

My kids were secretly happy that school was cancelled but that only lasted a few days. Then the teachers had a steep curve to start teaching online. Then my kids started missing being in class and having social interaction with their teachers and friends.

Austin still had to work every day - talking about the the virus, co-vid19/coronavirus, over and over.

I still had to work every day - it was just at the beginning of tax season. I tried to go in early so I could get off earlier in the afternoon.

All of a sudden, we had crossed every thing off our calendar, except birthdays.

Even Austin who goes to a ton of church meetings each week, now no meetings.