As noted in his last email, the Associate Vice Chancellor for Auxiliary Services Brice Ken Kikuchi has listed all of the closings of buildings and services campus-wide due to COVID-19. Anteater Expresses buses have stopped running as of Wednesday night at 11 p.m., forcing students to walk, bike, or use some form of alternative transportation to get to campus and back to their place of residence. On-campus amenities, such as the UPS store, The Hill, the Wells Fargo and SchoolsFirst banks, and all of the fast-food chains that are not dining halls have shut their doors. This means that if you rented your book from the Hill but did not return it on time, you’re basically screwed.
Personally, I will admit that at first, I was pretty excited about spring break coming early, but then I quickly found out that it was not as fun as I thought it was. Unless you are an extreme introvert, you will miss going to all of the campus socials and events, gossiping with friends, going to parties, and all of the other little things about the school year that you enjoyed.
Even back home, things don’t get any better. I and my boyfriend can no longer go on our Starbucks dates because restaurants no longer offer dine-in seating, forcing people to either stick with delivery services like Postmates (not recommended for those who are on a budget due to the extremely high delivery fees), drive/walk up to the restaurant themselves and order their food-to-go, or just stay at home and cook all together.
Regarding panic-buying, although it is a good idea to stock up on food so that you won’t have to come back in the future, it is also counter-intuitive if you are not buying food that you know you will definitely eat. You don’t want to panic-buy food that will rot and spoil in your fridge, or sit in the pantry for months and never get eaten because you will end up wasting money in the process. It’s best to take only what you personally need and leave the rest for shoppers who actually need food to eat. One person does not need five cartons of milk, ten cases of bottled water, eight dozen packs of toilet paper, or six containers of strawberries.
I remember the day when I and my boyfriend went on our date last Sunday, and we decided to stop by at the Northgate Gonzalez supermarket in my area. We were met with a long line of people standing outside of the store waiting to get inside. As soon as we got in, we noticed that some of the shelves of produce have been picked clean. Toilet paper and water bottles were to be sold individually upon request, and non-perishable goods were nowhere to be found. Upon checkout, we noticed that the back door had also been deactivated as a means of theft prevention, forcing shoppers to enter and exit through the front, where they can be seen by the guards.
After I move all my things out of Arroyo Vista, I will have to figure out how I am going to live during the entirety of this COVID-19 crisis. The City of Los Angeles has already closed down bars, nightclubs, libraries, gyms, and entertainment venues, and has prohibited people from dining in at local restaurants. If public transportation goes next (which I doubt because a lot of people rely heavily on public transportation to go to work– yes, there are some individuals who still have to go to work, my father included), that means being forced to cough up hundreds of dollars for ridesharing services, and if those services freeze, and you have no other alternative method of transportation, then you are basically stuck.
While it is very upsetting to find out that spring break, graduation, prom, ZotCon, Summerlands, GradNite, and multiple other events that people have been looking forward to will not happen, we also must appreciate the fact that cities and counties across America, as well as many other countries worldwide, are taking precautionary measures to contain the virus in order to limit its spread as much as possible. It is better to act now and to have it under control than to have it spiral out of control to the point where hospitals have way too many COVID-infected patients to handle, and as a result, the death rates start to skyrocket.