My Corona Experience so far

I am a 26-year old teaching student and live at home with my parents since returning from a two-year stay at a university in the USA. In our house we have two flats: I share the one on the ground floor with my parents and my 84-year old grandma lives upstairs. We are currently self-quarantining. 

We are basically on mandatory quarantine as my dad returned from a skiing trip to Austria last Friday, but we would have started to socially distance ourselves anyways, even if my dad had not gone to Austria. We are able to do so as I am a student between two semesters with no classes happening, my mum is a freelance writer for a newspaper as well as a coach for athletics and my father, who works for a big German telecommunications company, has the ability to work from home. His company has since two weeks ago told their employees to try to avoid any face-to-face meetings.  Since my mom is a freelance sports writer for a local newspaper, she cannot earn any money currently. Her athletics practice has also been cancelled till mid-April.

I have not had contact with my grandma in two weeks, as she had some health issues in January and tries to stay as far away from us as possible. We only communicate on our stairs, keeping as much distance between us, as we can. She started this measure with me first since I use public transport to get to Frankfurt and back. Even though I have not had any university since February 14, I have continued to go to university as I am in the last year of my studies and have a big final paper to write as well as other small ones.

The last time I was in Frankfurt was on Monday. I had to arrange some things for my final exams in autumn, but could not do so, as most of the universities offices have already been closed. Even though our state promised to make it possible for students to write their final exams, on Wednesday they stopped the exams. A fellow student of mine was supposed to have her last written exam on Wednesday and when she arrived at the University was told that all exams had been suspended until further notice. Not only is that causing troubles for the ongoing exams this spring, but also my exams in autumn will be affected by this. 

I was surprised at how many people are still taking their car to the city and are walking around or taking their bikes to the park, even though we have been told to keep away from each other as much as possible.

And in our small town (approximately 12,000 inhabitants) it is no different. Even though we have the highest number of people infected in our district Main-Kinzig-Kreis, and the high risk group are the ones over 60, most of the people walking around in the town are in that age group.  On my last trip to the supermarket on Monday, exactly that group were the ones there as well. After having no fruit and vegetables on Friday as well as Many of the essential foods gone, on Monday everything was stocked again except for flour, pasta, canned meals and toilet paper.

From what I see from my neighbours, they have not understood the situation we are currently in. I see the kids leaving to go on play dates with other kids from the area, I see the elderly people taking their car to who knows where, inviting the neighbours to come in.

So far yesterday has been the most interesting day in our quarantine. First we had a call with a survey about the VW diesel scandal, right after we had received some new information about that through mail, then we had a woman calling trying to scam us by pretending to be a relative (a call to my mother and my grandmother) and then somebody from a local energy company showed up at our door happily wanting to shake hands with my father.