Americans brace for new life of no school, sense of dread
Millions of Americans braced for the week with no school for their children for many days to come, no clue how to effectively do their jobs without child care, and a growing sense of dread about how to stay safe and sane amid the relentless spread of the coronavirus.
Are play dates for the kids OK? How do you stock up on supplies when supermarket shelves are bare? How do you pay the bills when your work hours have been cut? Is it safe to go to the gym? And how do you plan for the future with no idea what it holds?
“Today looks so different from yesterday, and you just don’t know what tomorrow is going to look like,” said Christie Bauer, a family photographer and mother of three school-age children in West Linn, Oregon.
Tens of millions of students nationwide have been sent home from school amid a wave of closings that include all of Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio, Oregon and Washington state, along with bigcity districts like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington. Some schools announced they will close for three weeks, others for up to six.
Many working parents are scrambling to find child care, even if they are being allowed to work from home. The child care needs are especially dire for the legions of nurses, hospital and health care workers across the country who need to be on the job to deal with the crisis.
Governors drew up emergency plans to find child care for front-line medical workers and first responders, equating it to a wartime effort.
“I would put this as a World War II-capacity day care for our public health workers because we’re going to need every single body we can get,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said.
Parents desperate to get to work with schools closed have jumped on social media boards to seek child care or to exchange tips about available babysitters.
Seattle resident John Persak set up a Facebook group for parents with children at home because of school closings. The group exploded to nearly 3,000 members in a week.
“We’re getting about five requests a minute at this point,” said Persak, a father and crane operator at the port of Seattle, who said his work hours have been curtailed for weeks by the coronavirus outbreak, which is affecting cargo deliveries from Asia.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has defied mounting pressure to close the nation’s biggest school system, saying shutting the schools for the more than 1.1 million students could hamper the city’s ability to respond to the crisis by forcing parents who are first responders and health care workers to cast about for child care or stay home.
“Many, many parents want us to keep schools open,” he said.
In New York City, where de Blasio called the scramble to fight the coronavirus a “wartime scenario,” a passerby who noticed relatively light crowds at a Whole Foods supermarket on Manhattan’s Upper East Side remarked: “That’s because there’s no food left!”
That was far from true, though some items — frozen foods, canned tuna, herbal teas, bagged salad — were sold out or nearly so. Signs limited customers to two large packs of toilet paper apiece, and few were available. A similar scenario played out at supermarkets around the country amid a run on staples that reached a peak Friday.