Coronavirus Diary Entries

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Diary Entries
Diary Entries

March 2020

3/18/20

My dad and his company have been very interested with the Coronavirus - specifically the statistics. His company, Coda, is a document system similar to google Docs, and they have made a tracker system that shows graphs and data about the Coronavirus. They update their data daily from

this website⁠

. One interesting thing I learned from their graphing system is that the doubling rate of the virus is essential to understanding how the virus works. Many people see that other countries have tens of thousands of more cases of the virus than their own, but they don’t realize that in just a few days they will have the same amount.

⁠

This graph shows the amount of confirmed cases, and recoveries and deaths in patients. I found it interesting that many countries are not worrying about giving out tests even though it could make their data more accurate. I realized that with more accurate data, each country would be able to cater to their citizens' needs in a more effective fashion. I’m kind of frustrated by the fact that people are so ignorant about something that’s affecting EVERYBODY.

I kinda wish people would stop talking about the coronavirus because it just makes everything seem more and more depressing. It’s getting annoying hearing my whole family constantly talking about the coronavirus and trying to do stuff together.

3/23/20

Throughout this entire coronacation (corona - vacation) so far, I’ve learned a lot about different things I can do to keep myself busy and entertain myself. Before this, I’ve always had trouble coming up with things to do, however, being forced to come up with stuff to do with and without my family has been an interesting adventure. I’ve played a lot of games recently - pandemic, scrabble, codenames, Bananagrams, etc. - and I’ve watched a lot of Netflix, mainly Grey’s Anatomy, but I need something else to do that doesn’t involve technology and is still educational. I’ve started preparing for math competitions that might happen in the future and working on lanyards. Every summer I get really into making lanyards and friendship bracelets but then as soon as school starts I usually drop the habit. Since this is like an extended summer vacation, I’m kinda happy to pick back up my summer habits.

I’ve also been trying to spend more time with my family since on a normal week I generally don’t have much time but now that we’re home I have a lot of time!

I find it very interesting that people don’t understand that the doubling rate is what makes the coronavirus so scary. Many people look at the US’s numbers and Italy’s numbers and see a huge difference. But what they don’t see is that the US is doubling its number of cases every 2 days so, in just a few days, the US will long surpass Italy’s number of cases. It is also pretty scary that the number of cases is most likely severely undercounted. Many places around the world just don’t have enough tests or enough supplies to take care of as many people are getting infected. Many hospitals are running out of or have already run out of surgical masks and gloves as well as the ventilator systems that are needed to support the patients with covid-19.

3/26/20

I’m still pretty sick of hearing everybody talking about the coronavirus like all the time. My dad is always working on stuff with the coronavirus and during his work calls, I can hear him from my desk. Then at dinner last night, we spent the entire time talking about the coronavirus related to my mom’s office. Yesterday, during lunch my friends and I spent like half an hour talking about the coronavirus. I feel like I spend more time in my day learning about the coronavirus than anything else. Which is some ways is a good thing, but I’m just kind of tired of hearing the same thing being talked about for two weeks, and if this shelter in place is going to go on until May 1, this is going to be a very long month of April.

Anyways, I’m pretty excited because we still have a few more birthdays coming up - including mine - and it’s always cool to think about “virtual presents”. For one of my friends, I created a video of her friends all saying “Happy Birthday!” and something else nice to her. She really liked it. Since I’m going to be home with my family over my birthday, I was thinking I’m going to have to treat myself. So, I think I’m going to make myself some crepes and maybe watch a movie or something to occupy myself.

I’ve also been trying to work out in my free time since I do get a lot of that. I’ve started using our family’s Peloton (a stationary bike) as well as doing some of their groundwork routines. In PE, we’ve been doing a lot of workout videos as well which have been nice since they force me to workout during the day and not just early in the morning or late at night. With my sister, I’ve been doing this 30-day ab challenge, and we’re on day 8 and it’s getting progressively harder. So far we’ve done crunches, toe touches, roll ups, etc. I’m also super excited for bootcamp this week!

TL;DR I’m sick of the coronavirus, I’m excited for my birthday, and I’ve been working out a lot more

April 2020

4/1/20

I have a feeling that people didn’t like the coronacation in the beginning but once the world starts to revert back to our “normal” way of life, people aren’t going to want to do simple things like picking up groceries, going to work, and meeting up with friends. I think that the COVID-19 is turning the world into more introverted people who might be more aware of the world around them. Since people have so much time at home, I believe that people are more interested in paying attention to things like the news. For example, many of my friends and I have been watching the news and actually paying attention. Not because we are mandated in school or told to by our parents, but because we are finally curious about what is happening around the world. Also, because people are being accustomed to doing everything online - buying groceries, shopping, interacting with other people - I bet that people are going to have a pretty hard time transitioning back when it’s not necessary for everything to do be done from the comfort of your own home. People find their houses safe and clean, so what’s going to happen when people start going into “dirty” places? People are going to feel the need to be super cautious about what their touching, how close they are to other people, and what they are doing at any given moment. This innate social distancing may become the new norm and it may help prevent other outbreaks of other diseases.

On another note, my sister and her friends have been planning something for weeks, and it finally got to unfold last night. They were planning a surprise zoom birthday party for their friend and even all made cards and sent in pictures. It was really cute, but they were pretty loud! Finally, I got sick of my bedroom where I have been taking all my classes for the past 3 weeks so I decided to start taking my classes outside. In my backyard, we have a cabana/pool house which gets a lot of natural light and has A/C and heating. I really like working out here and feel like I’m getting less distracted since today I have gotten a lot more work than usual done and it’s only 9:30!

4/2/20

It just hit me how influential we could be. Like tiktok clout and instagram clout is one thing, but like being famous members of history that’s pretty neat. These coronavirus diaries really could be super influential in the next 100 years when people of the future are looking back on these terrible times. People would probably be pretty interested in school life since it was one of the first things to get affected. Not only could these diary entries be important but anything we do or change about the world in these times. Since a lot less people are driving, carbon emissions worldwide have dropped significantly, so maybe in the future people will see this time as a rejuvenation period for the Earth. For example, according to the Scientific American online newspaper, in China, the world’s largest carbon emitter, experts estimate that emissions over the past month have been about 25% lower than normal. Earth is being treated so nicely right now while the humans are being tortured for a change. This might be just the thing to convince humans to actually care about the Earth and make a lasting impact on the world.

I also just realized how sad today was. Today, we got the notice that school is cancelled for the rest of the 2019-2020 school year. Since I’m in my eighth grade year, I’ll be missing some pretty important things - graduation, my final choir concert, the waltz showcase, in-person 3 intersession, etc. - but I also realized how terrible this must be for people like seniors. For seniors, one of the most fun aspects of that year is not going to class but now, not going to class feels more like a punishment than going to class. Not only was I excited to experience my own firsts and lasts at BCS, I was also looking forward to watching the 7th graders go through what I went through last year. We had to perform MND outside when it was over 100 degrees outside everyday. We had the poetry slam, where it started raining right before we were supposed to be there and my friends and I had to walk a mile back to the school. I really wanted to see how all the other groups were going to build their MND shows and how other students’ poems were going to come out, but now a lot of curriculum is being shifted. In particular, a lot of BCS’s curriculum that makes BCS so special is going to have to be changed/adapted for this weird time. A lot of BCS’s curriculum focuses on student to teacher interaction and incorporation of hands-on STEAM activities into every subject. But now that everyone is isolated it’s very hard to continue those programs.

4/13/20

We’re just getting back from spring break and I’m pretty tired. Over spring break I had been consistently staying up past 11 pm either reading or watching TV. It’s going to be hard to transition back to “normal” school life with going to sleep early and waking up early, and also actually having work to do during the day.

Over spring break I used a

habit tracker⁠

created by my dad in

Coda⁠

where each of my family members would check off tasks that they wanted to get done each day. For example, I wanted to do things like work on my competitive math, workout, and play the cello every day. This was a good way for us to make sure we had stuff to do so that we weren’t bored out of our minds. Over spring break I also watched A LOT of Grey’s Anatomy. The show is seriously addicting. I finished all the way through Season 15 and I’m now waiting for Season 16 to come out on Netflix since the season finale was just aired on live TV.

Even though we don’t have school and my cello certificate of merit event has been postponed, I’m still prepping for my cello FLG and merit event. I’ve been working on memorizing the Sonata in C Major by J. B. Breval and adding dynamics to make the music more interesting. The rest of my preparation has been going pretty smoothly but I need to work on my Music Theory and my arm strength. One of the biggest problems I’ve encountered is the fact that my arm/shoulder gets really tired after playing one piece through, and I effectively had 4 full 2-minute pieces. I’m excited rather than stressed like I usually am for this event because I now know that I will have a plentiful amount of time to prepare and really give the certificate of merit my full strength. When I participated last year, I received an 88% which is passing but I knew I could do much better. Last year, however, I didn’t have much time to practice and I was also super swamped with other work. Now that I have a lot of free time on my hands I can be super prepared and maybe score over 93%.

4/14/20

This morning, we found out that our school schedule is getting a full overhaul. Our school day is now going to start at 9:00 am and end around 1:00 pm, with five 40-minute periods before lunch and then 2 hours of work time after lunch. I like the idea of clearly separating instruction time and work time because I think it will make me more productive, but I think that starting at 9 is going to be a problem for me. I tend to wake up really early, so I’m going to have a bunch of time before school starts with nothing to do. I’m probably going to end up either reading a lot more or cooking more for my family. Or possibly both, who knows?

Also, my birthday is coming up and I’m excited to see my mom’s cake! Every year, she makes me and my sister cakes for our birthdays that are fully decorated with fondant and everything and they look really professional. This year, my mom is keeping the cake design a secret from me but I already know that she’s been buying fancy ingredients just for this cake. All of my friends look forward to her cakes every year, and this is the first year since I turned 6 that I won’t be sharing my birthday with my friends. Last year, we had so much fun at my birthday party. We went swimming, made pretzels, had cake, and had a sleepover. My birthday is pretty fun for me because it is one of the only days where I get a free pass to reconnect with my relatives who I don’t interact with a lot as well as talk to some of my favorite people. For example, my cousins, Jaiden(7) and Dylan(5) live in Irvine so I don’t get to see them often, but on our birthdays we always facetime. I also have a lot of relatives who live in India and I don’t get to talk to them often, but when I do I love to learn about how life is going in a totally different place around the world. My aunt is a news reporter in India and it’s really interesting to get to hear her perspective on politics and life over there, especially during the quarantine.

4/20/20

This weekend was super fun. My birthday was on Saturday, and I received a lot of careful gifts and surprises. I started Saturday off by making some really delicious crepes from scratch. I made some sweet and savory ones with Nutella, fruit, and omelets. We had a late and lazy morning that was sprinkled with calls and texts from my friends and family from around the world. After breakfast, I had a trig class which was pretty easy and made me feel productive even on my birthday.

Towards the afternoon we went swimming for a little bit and watched some TV out in the cabana. We have a really nice backyard with a cabana and pool which makes it feel like we are on vacation somewhere tropical. After swimming for a little bit my mom called me out of the pool because my friends had set up a surprise birthday party for me on Zoom! I was super excited and jumped out of the pool to go talk to them. After my party with my school friends, I spent the rest of the night on various other Zoom calls with other groups of my friends and family.

First, I spoke to my mom’s side of the family and my two cousins. We sliced cake and updated each other about what was going on in each of our lives. Then we moved on to our family friends. We talked for a while and cut cake with the whole group - parents, and kids - then switched over to just having the kids on the call. We then proceeded to play charades over Zoom which was really fun. Finally, we ended the night with a Zoom call with my dad’s side of the family. Some of my dad’s side of the family lives in India so we had to make the meeting really late so that it would be at an appropriate time for the people across the world. In these meetings, we almost always end up arguing about coronavirus data and statistics since we have news reporters, scientists, doctors, and data analysts in this group. On this call, we specifically talked a lot about how India is being affected by the coronavirus since it’s currently so divided. In the US, all the states take command under one central government. In India, most of the important decisions go to state governments so each state is handling this pandemic differently. The whole country has been on lockdown for a while, and certain countries are now starting to open up. The national government has declared certain areas hot spots with lots of cases and certain areas non-contaminated zones. Slowly, places around the uncontaminated zones will be opened back up while the national government is simultaneously making sure that those areas stay contamination free.

4/21/20

Last night my family and I watched the One World: Together At Home Concert that aired on Saturday. I really liked the idea of mixing the songs in between factual lectures from celebrities. However, I think the concert would have been more interesting if the singers sang their own songs instead of songs related to the coronavirus. I understand that people are not educated about the coronavirus and it’s important for people to learn more and keep themselves safe, but personally I’m really sick of always hearing about the coronavirus. It’s hard to even remember what we used to talk about before the quarantine. I wish on the concert last night the hosts and celebrities featured would’ve talked about what they’re doing at home and other things going on in the world.

Last night, they talked a lot about how African Americans are heavily affected by the coronavirus.

For example, according to
Vox⁠
, in Wisconsin “African Americans represent 6 percent of the population, but nearly 40 percent of Covid-19 fatalities”.

People are recognizing that African Americans are more vulnerable to Covid-19 so they are providing extra support through donations and giving free masks and supplies to those in poverty. Due to America’s long-standing economic differences between its white inhabitants and it’s African American ones, African Americans are more likely to have underlying conditions.

School and class have been going pretty well, but I’m starting to get a little stir crazy here at home. Unlike most people, I have a lot more work while at home. Not schoolwork, but work for classes I do outside of school and for extra-curricular activities. Since everybody is home with lots more time on their hands many of my teachers are piling up harder work. I’ve recently started a new math class for competitive math which is pretty challenging but I’m really enjoying it. I’m currently taking Algebra II at school, trigonometry at RSM (Russian School of Math), and a new competitive math class based off of precalculus at RandomMath. Although I know in the long run I’ll be proud of all the work I’m doing now and how well I manage my time and organize my schedule, right now all I want to do is live a “normal” life like every other teenager. I want to be able to watch TV and go on social media to connect with people. I want to have fewer responsibilities than adults and enjoy being a kid while I can. Many of my friends have watched multiple TV shows, made big changes to their bedrooms with their free time while I don’t have time to do anything to that scale.

4/28/20

Over the past weekend, my dad, my sister, and I went on a bike ride around our neighborhood. It was really fun! We rode about 3 miles at around 10 miles per hour. The air was really refreshing and I got to work out a new group of muscles on my body. On Monday afternoon, I got to go on another bike ride, except this time, we also stopped at almond to play frisbee. I haven’t been able to do long throws at my house since my backyard isn’t long enough. It was really fun to be able to run around and throw really far. I’ve also started to work on a set of pneumatic exercises in my lego kits. Due to the coronavirus, our international Lego robotics championships in Greece were canceled, so I’m working on some new strategies so our team will be able to win again. Even though Gabi and I will be aging out of the Lego robotics program, my sister and her friends will be participating in the competition next year. We have created a legacy for our team, #PandaPower, and we hope to keep that up for the coming future. We’ve started by mentoring other teams and teaching them some of our tips and tricks so that we will be able to pass our knowledge down onto the next generation of kids.

Also, we were recently told that quarantine is now going to be extended about another month. However, it’s only effective in certain states and places. I think it’s kind of dumb for places to be loosening their quarantine restrictions because it is so easy for the coronavirus to spike again if people are not careful. I think that California is very smart to keep its restrictions tight because I think that in the long run people will be grateful that they weren’t infected with the coronavirus. Even though people may not be happy to stay inside for another month, it will preserve our world for a little bit longer and allow the world to make an even bigger comeback when it can.

4/30/20

It's kind of crazy to think that I've been at Bullis for 9 years. That's about 64% of my life. 1620 days, 9 grades, over 20 teachers, hundreds of friends. That is insane to me. The culmination project is forcing me to really look at what BCS has done for me while I've been here, and it's so apparent that BCS has made a huge impact on my life. I've made some of my very best friends here, been inspired to learn new things, and inspire change in others. For example, if I hadn't gone to the BCS Maker Faires starting in second grade, I would have never joined #PandaPower, my Lego robotics team. Since then, robotics has become a huge part of my life and our team has not been internationally recognized twice. BCS’s amazing physical education program helped me become the very athletic person I am today and gave me a place to help teach others to be athletic like me too. I started my own Ultimate Frisbee school at BCS, and since then many of my friends and other students at the school have come to playing Frisbee all the time! It’s so cool to see that I helped people find a new hobby just based off of my own hobby.

Although the coronavirus has taken away some experiences of mine that I will never be able to get back, it’s also presented me with a totally new set of opportunities that I can choose to take. Since we have so much time, I can choose to pursue all of the hobbies that I’ve wanted to try and become better at things I didn’t have time to before. For example, this year, my FLL team qualified to compete at the international championships in Thessaloniki, Greece, however that is obviously canceled. But since that is canceled, I’ve gotten the opportunity to try different things with our robotics kits. I’ve been learning about pneumatic systems and how they can be built and be useful in these competitions. So far, the machines I’ve built have been very cool! Also because we have so much time, I’ve been working on my competitive math skills. I joined a new math group called Random Math, and I’ve been working a lot to prepare for the AMC 8 and 10 tests as well as AIME. I’m really proud of the work I’ve done - the first time I took an AMC 10 test I got 16/25, but when I took another AMC 10 test last night, I got a 20/25!

Just like me, many of my friends are pretty sad that we’re losing the final half of our eighth-grade year, so we’ve started to imagine some cool things we can do together when this is all over. We want to rent a large beach house together in Santa Cruz and go spend a weekend down there together. It would be like a giant party to make up for all of the time together that we missed out on, and have a proper goodbye before people leave to go to different high schools. We would go down to the beach and swim in the ocean, maybe go to the beach boardwalk, and just hang out. If quarantine is down by the end of the summer, we’d love to take a week together and just be together.

March 2021

3/18/21

It’s been a while since I wrote a diary entry, but since we just passed the one year anniversary of going into quarantine, and the one year anniversary of my first diary entry, I thought it would be fitting to reflect on the past year at home.

A lot of my past entries have mentioned something about wanting people to stop talking about covid and stop making such a big deal out of it - yeah that didn’t happen. It’s been all over the news, magazines, social media, everywhere and it has never moved out of the public eye. However, it did switch from people being totally scared of Covid and just whining about how life has been turned on its head to more about what will happen when we go back, and what other big issues have come to light because of the world’s pause from Covid. Big issues like racism and police brutality have been brought back in to the public eye following the tragic killings of many black americans and asian americans over the past year.

We have spent so much time at home and I think it’s really starting to effect my work ethic and productiveness. Home life and school life/work life are not separated so the lines are starting to blur between “me time” and “work time”. I often spend too much time working and not enough time relaxing because I have no indicator of when in the day school and work are over.

We have vaccines! The world is progressing, the world is recovering, the world will get out of Covid and will return to normal. Well, some kind of normal, maybe a new normal, but a normal nonetheless. In the US we have about 40M people fully vaccinated and like 110M people with at least one shot!