Personal experience: I live in the USA during a pandemic

On March 27, the United States came out on top in the world in terms of the number of COVID-19 cases, the first in the world in terms of the number of cases of coronavirus, overtaking China and Italy. Taken Into the Streets of New York For the first time since 9/11, NYC has set up makeshift morgues. This time, it's in anticipation of coronavirus deaths, experts predict that because of the pandemic, one in five Americans will lose their jobs due to coronavirus deaths, experts predict that because of the pandemic, one in five Americans predicted a job loss due to coronavirus, and doctors are already complaining about the lack of equipment.

Lifehacker spoke with the founder of Ecwid, Ruslan Fazlyev, who has been living in the United States for five years. He told how residents, to the last, refused to believe in the danger of a new virus, what measures the government was taking and how the life of the country changed in a matter of months.

Do you know the old, old way of accepting the inevitable, from denial to humility? America went through it.

For a long time people could not believe that there was something really serious in front of them. There is something racist about this denial: "The coronavirus is something for the Chinese, for us big white people it is not." People really thought that the disease could not cross the US border, and did not take any action. No one was in a hurry to buy disposable masks, hospitals did not stock up on equipment - in general, there was no preparation. This continued literally until the beginning of March. In the middle of the month, the government sounded the alarm, but awareness reached ordinary Americans much later.

Not just a cold

Americans are quite irresponsible about the common cold. It's perfectly normal to come to work in snot, sneeze and cough, and infect all your colleagues here. People are used to carrying colds on their feet. Someone, in principle, does not have sick leave at work, and someone works according to the PTO (Paid Time Off) system, according to which you have a paid time away from the office, and how exactly it is distributed is up to you.

At first I thought it was great, because you can set work and non-work days yourself, but in practice everything does not look so rosy: when a person gets sick, he prefers to endure a cold on his feet and spend the free time on extending the vacation. Many people with coronavirus habitually ignored their symptoms and continued to go to work in the hope of saving vacation days.

In addition, The Dangerous Delays in U. S. has not been tested for a long time in the United States. Coronavirus Testing Haven’t Stopped those who did not seem to have contact with the infected and did not travel abroad. Even if a person had all the symptoms, but he did not go to China, he was not given a test.

Living by new rules

What began next could be called depression. It is we in Russia who are accustomed to a variety of crises. How many of them there were only in my life: the country in which I was born collapsed, the ruble fell more than once - yesterday you could buy an apartment with your savings, and today only a video recorder.

In Russia, they are used to adapting their life to any tin, and for us the situation with the coronavirus is just another crisis. America was in a real shock.

This is a completely different approach to money and spending. If we are accustomed to saving for large purchases for years, then the average American chooses instant comfort and takes out a loan for the house or car he likes. As soon as he receives a salary, he literally immediately gives it away, paying off a million debts to banks. Missing one paycheck in this case is a disaster.

According to forecasts, one in five Americans was predicted to lose their jobs due to the coronavirus, more than 20% of the population will lose their jobs: these numbers are comparable to the New Great Depression: how the pandemic is destroying the world economy with the indicators of the Great Depression. The blows to the very bottom of the economy, to ordinary people, knocked out the support from under the feet of an entire country. Small businesses are suffering: everything is closed except for pharmacies, grocery stores and medical centers.

Some businesses have changed the rules they used to play by: for example, one coffee shop, which I often went to, stopped requiring a signature on the terminal. Contactless payments are not very common in the USA, they are supported by a maximum of a third of establishments: after all, when you sign a check, you can enter a tip there. They can be up to 20% of the bill, and you literally have no right not to leave them: for the staff of the institution, this is a uniform robbery. It is a huge gesture that a small coffee shop has given up such a large portion of its income.

Couriers who deliver goods to your home have also stopped requiring a signature. They bring a package, leave it at the door and shout: "Will you sign?" You say: "No, let's do it yourself." Their signature looks like this for you: the mark “COVID-19” and your last name next to it.

All shopping, even grocery shopping, goes online. Everyone is using delivery, and courier services have begun to work intermittently. My wife was recently surprised: "Ruslan, it seems like the mass hysteria" prepare and buy "has passed, why can't you order anything?" But if earlier only a part of the population used delivery, then today everyone does it. And even if people do not order a ton of goods, couriers still do not have time to reach everyone.

In offline stores, everything is deplorable. Toilet paper was swept to hell.

Its shortage turned into a real accident: in Southern California, there were reports of clogged sewers. Since the paper is nowhere to be found, the Americans began to use whatever they hit as an alternative.

There is no canned food in supermarkets, no ready-made frozen food, no chicken or meat. I went shopping and just didn’t know what to take: nothing was left on the budget, everyone dared. In the end, I grabbed the freshest Mediterranean sea bass, cool steaks and grabbed eight lobster tails - I had to stock up on what others did not buy. Some goods are released today with a limited number of one hand.

Sanitizers were also snapped up: my wife bought some green one with a hippie image and an Organic mark - no one wanted to take it. Everyone hoped to snatch something more powerful: they say, we, please, the same powerful as "Dichlorvos". In critical conditions, those who yesterday were proud of their "green" habits sweep away the most challenging chemistry. Antiseptic manufacturers are clearly winning today: our Australian client, for example, sold half a million dollars worth of sanitizers in a matter of days.

Hope for change

Now is the stage of acceptance. Fewer and fewer passers-by are going out into the streets, there are no more vacationers' cars outside my window. For some time, the builders in the neighborhood continued to work, but now I do not hear the rumble of their equipment.

Communication with citizens in the United States is built much more transparently than in Russia: information on the number of cases arrives very quickly and is sobering well. We got SMS notifications from local authorities quite early. Many people learned about the first victim in my city precisely from such a notification. Today, we are no longer notified of every death from coronavirus, because their number has increased dramatically. But there is a positive effect from such messages: people really began to prefer the house to walks much more often.

Employees are gradually getting used to working remotely. Our partners replace meetings with video conferencing. The state is trying to help ordinary citizens: the population is going to the US Senate approved the allocation of $ 2 trillion to support the economy during a pandemic to distribute money, small businesses - loans.

But even with this approach, I see colossal losses. Government aid seems like just a drop in the ocean.

It was relatively easy for Ecwid to move to work from home: my business is built on the fact that we give people the ability to sell online, and all the actions that the team performs every day are easy to replicate remotely. Our number of clients - entrepreneurs who are switching from offline to online - has grown dramatically. For them, we have become almost the only chance to survive. We made a special offer, according to which you can get our service now, and pay later: the year 2020 has not entered anyone, so we will not take money from you, so that tomorrow you will not close and we will not be left without clients at all. Since we are a venture-backed company, we have the opportunity to choose the latter between short-term and long-term interests.

My town of Del Mar is very small - but even we already have six cases. True, I did not understand exactly how this was counted: if they took only the inner region, where about four thousand people live, then the numbers are catastrophic, worse than in Italy. But, most likely, sociologists looked at statistics for the district with adjacent territories, where 40 thousand inhabitants live - in this case, the statistics are equal to the average for the United States.

In San Diego, for 3.3 million of the population, Coronavirus in San Diego County accounts for 600 patients, 120 of whom are in hospitals, 50 are in intensive care, 7 are dead. I am deliberately leaving this proposal, but it was written a week ago, before the article was published. Now it is already 1,400 patients, 270 of whom are in the hospital, 100 in intensive care and 19 more dead. And when we talk about 270 people in a hospital, we must understand that American hospitals are not admitted with mild symptoms. Here, even after heart surgery, they can be discharged on the same day.

I will not surprise anyone if I say that I start to worry at the slightest symptom of a cold - now this is familiar to many.

I almost never go out and try to adhere to a strict schedule: in working conditions from home, it is very important not to degrade. I hung a table on the fridge where I regularly record my weight and athletic performance. I was disciplined before, but now I have tightened my own rules: I count calories, I began to go in for sports more intensively, although, of course, I no longer attend boxing classes.

How long the self-isolation regime will last is unknown. I think a month or two. The restrictions will be lifted gradually, and I would not expect to return to normal life before June. We can only hope for the best.