Five years pass since COVID pandemic, students talk quarantine experiences

Half a decade has passed since the COVID outbreak was declared a national emergency in the United States, the pandemic causing mass shutdowns across the country — specifically in schools.

Kelly-Lynn Owens

Individuals who were in middle and high school when the pandemic first hit are now college-aged adults. Northwest freshman Kelly-Lynn Owens was in eighth grade in March 2020. The then-14-year-old was sleeping over at her friend’s house when she found out about her extended spring break, and said she and her friends were thrilled at first.

However, the initial excitement quickly wore off for Owens, whose mother was diagnosed with cancer in January of that year.

“A lot of my teachers were super supportive and helpful during that time, because my mom was in the hospital the whole time, and my dad was there taking care of her,” Owens said. “I was spending a lot of time alone, and honestly, I really missed school. I missed just having some kind of support system.”

Owens said due to COVID policies at Mosaic Medical Center-St. Joseph, people under the age of 18 — such as herself at the time — were not allowed into the hospital. Owens said her mom did a lot of her treatments by herself, which made Owens feel helpless.

Owens did not return to school until her sophomore year of high school. At that point, her mother had died, and her father’s work union was on strike, so she worked part-time at McDonald’s to help out her family. She also said she did not feel ready to return to school just yet.

“It was definitely hard when I first went back to school…I think I had maybe one friend, and her brother was high risk, so we weren’t allowed to see each other, so I was just super isolated,” Owens said. “By the time I actually went back to high school, I felt like I had missed so much, and I didn’t know how to make friends or how to socialize at all.”

The pandemic, Owens said, changed the way her family and friendship dynamics worked. She said after being cut off from her friends and family for a year, she is not as close to the same people she once was.

Owens said the pandemic as a whole acted like a reality check for everybody in multiple ways, including economically, politically and socially.

“I think it really put things in perspective for people that history repeats itself and it's serious because I know a lot of people did not take it seriously at the time in the slightest, and that is a lot of the reason it got as big as it did,” Owens said.

Emma Pollice

Junior Emma Pollice’s household is considered high-risk. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines people with obesity, diabetes, asthma or chronic lung diseases, or who have other diseases and are immunocompromised as being high-risk for COVID.

Pollice said everyone in her family has asthma, with her and her mother possessing an autoimmune disorder as well. Her mother also has cancer, though Pollice said she is now in remission.

Pollice remembers being on a bus, waiting to arrive at a band competition when she and her peers received word they couldn’t go because someone at their school tested positive for the virus. At that moment, Pollice said, it became real. Her school shut down within a week.

“It just all got taken away really quickly, and I did not expect that it would be that long, because I thought people would do the right thing and just stay home and wear their masks,” Pollice said. “I did not expect that it would be a yearlong ordeal. I thought it was going to be two or three weeks tops.”

After an extended Spring Break, Pollice finished the school year from home, although she said many of the standardized tests were waived. The following year, however, Pollice said her friends were able to return to school, while she was not due to being high risk.

During quarantine, Pollice said she spent a lot of time outdoors, but this quickly grew old. She said she purposely took harder classes her first three years of high school so she could have an easygoing senior year, but online classes put a damper on that.

Pollice said the distance between her and her friends, as well as being cooped up with her family, caused some relational rifts in her life.

“I think that COVID mainly just impacted my relationship with others because it was so hard on me that I was struggling mentally the entire year that I was stuck in quarantine,” Pollice said.

Fox 5 New York recently reported on what it calls the COVID Time Warp, explaining how the pandemic — a large milestone in many’s lives — may have changed people’s perspective of time.

Pollice said time seems different to her since the pandemic, saying everything has seemed to go by much faster in the past five years. However, she has also heard that time may move faster as one ages, so Pollice said she is unsure what is causing her change in time perception. There is evidence of time seemingly speeding up as people age, according to Psychology Today.

In the event another pandemic or world health scare occurs, Pollice said she hopes everyone is prepared.

“I hope that if we have another pandemic it's not nearly as politicized and that it's taken seriously,” Pollice said.

Lance Hyde

Graduate student Lance Hyde is a high school teacher at Herculaneum High School in Herculaneum, Missouri. He took the job in 2019, and in November of that year, he said he remembers his students showing him information about a new disease breaking out in China.

“I assumed it was going to be no different than previous outbreaks like Ebola, SARS, or MERS,” Hyde said in an email to the Missourian. “Yet, once 2020 rolled around and COVID became more of a household name there was slight concern.”

Hyde said when everything became really serious in March 2020, the school superintendent declared two weeks off from school due to the pandemic. Hyde said the school was assured it would be back in session after those two weeks were over.

However, nobody came back to the school that year.

“As a teacher, we were told that we had to post educational material to Google classrooms, but it couldn't be anything new and we couldn't count it for a grade,” Hyde said. “Therefore, I had very little engagement from my students if they did not see any value or buy-in from it.”

Hyde said that semester became a massive educational waste since nothing was really being taught efficiently, and there was no real way to hold students accountable or keep in contact with them.

The 2020-2021 school year, Hyde said, began strangely. He had to rearrange his classroom, prove his desks were six feet apart and masks became mandatory, although he said many students refused to wear them.

“Parents were coming in to school boards with local and state politicians to protest the school's COVID protocol,” Hyde said. “There was even an organized protest of the local population across the street once a student was no longer allowed on campus because he refused to follow the mask measures. All the while (teachers) were expected to teach both in-person and virtual students.”

Hyde said all of the teachers quickly experienced burnout, as they were actually teaching double the amount of classes, doing both in-person and virtual. Something else he noticed was a massive loss of interest in education, with his students taking on a “who cares” persona when it came to learning.

Hyde took aside some students he trusted and asked them why this was, and they gave him up front and brutally honest answers. Hyde said his students questioned why they should do work when no one was held accountable. Many of his students, he said, came back with this mentality.

“I've also noticed a much larger reliance on cellphones than ever before,” Hyde said. “Our school district instituted a new cellphone policy and it was almost like watching people go through withdrawal symptoms from drugs or alcohol. At first I thought students were really blowing this out of proportion, but then I stopped and thought about it more.”

After putting it into perspective, Hyde said many teenagers looked to the internet as a sort of comfort during the pandemic when the adults did not have answers. Cutting off phone access to these children, he said, may be why they are rebelling and having meltdowns in schools more than before.

“I'm hoping that after five years we've learned a lot about each other and how fragile society is really held together,” Hyde said. “I'm also hoping that as these students grow up into adulthood we can label them as something more than the COVID generation.”

Maddy McDowell

Sophomore Maddy McDowell was in eighth grade when the pandemic hit. She said it seems unreal to her that it’s been five years, as time has been moving quickly for her since.

At first, the abrupt and early end to the school year did not bother her, as she thought COVID was similar to the flu. However, she was disappointed not to be able to attend her eighth-grade graduation.

Quarantining at home also came with difficulties for McDowell.

“It was hard, if I have to be completely honest,” McDowell said. “I live with my mom, and that at the time, my grandma was still alive, so it was my mom, my grandma, me and my three little brothers. I helped my mom and grandma out as much as I could with keeping my brothers occupied, because having nothing to do every hour of the day for basically a whole year, it felt like, was so rough on us.”

The following year, classes at McDowell’s small school were in person, but families were able to choose online learning if they wanted.

Going back to school was already hard, McDowell said, but she said there was a negative impact specifically in sports. This affected her playing tennis, which she did all throughout high school.

“We still went to practices and everything, but then it was like one after another sport, the sport teams started getting down with COVID, and we'd have to quarantine,” McDowell said. “That was truly a game changer for me, because the first time I was in quarantine, I didn't have COVID, but I had to quarantine away from my whole family. I was the first one in my family to have to quarantine.”

As for sports attendance, McDowell said teammates were only given two tickets for their families, so there were never many people in the stands at events.

As the pandemic continued to grow, with new variants arising, McDowell said she realized everyone handled COVID differently. She deals with a weakened immune system herself due to allergy-induced asthma, so the virus took a toll on her.

“The last time I had it, my body was weak enough that I couldn't even walk up the stairs to get upstairs to my mom to go to the doctor,” McDowell said. “My boyfriend and my mom had to work together to get me up the stairs and into the car. So not only did it (affect) the person that had COVID, it also impacted everyone else in the family.”

McDowell said it took her a long time to gain strength back to participate in sports again. When it comes to her sense of smell and taste, she said there are some foods she cannot eat anymore, saying COVID ruined them for her.

Persistent or prolonged damage to taste buds caused by low amounts of COVID can linger for months or even more than a year, according to the National Institute on Aging.

Despite some of the struggles the virus has brought her, McDowell said COVID affects the body like any other sickness does, and she felt the quarantine and isolation periods were intense. She said she understands many people had health issues and were immunocompromised, but she said younger children and teenagers had it worse than anyone.

“When we're young, we want to be on the move,” McDowell said. “We don't want to be at home, we want to live a life.”

Zachary Gullick

Freshman Zachary Gullick was 14 years old and in eighth grade when the pandemic hit. He said he cannot believe it’s been five years since then, and that the past five years still feel like 2020 to him.

At first, Gullick was excited to have a break from school, but he did not realize the pandemic would last as long as it did.

However, Gullick said his town’s smaller population meant he was able to return to in-person classes the following year.

“Being from a small town, I mean, COVID was a concern, but we did in-person,” Gullick said. “We had a choice to do online.”

During the pandemic, Gullick occasionally visited his grandparents' house, but he did not hang out with his friends or socialize outside of school as often.

Although he was able to return to school, it was different from before. He said he mostly traveled from his home to school, and then straight back to his home again.

“To me, the biggest impact school-wise, is that (we) couldn't do assemblies, didn’t go on field trips,” Gullick said. “We didn’t have any of the fun parts of school, it's more just like school, school, school, school — it kind of ruined school for me. I'm a guy that enjoys school and other things about it.”

Gullick said other changes COVID made to the world include its effects on the health industry, essential workers and businesses like movie theaters shutting down.

The pandemic and its related lockdowns and precautions affected health care spending greatly, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Changes in spending for the years 2020-2021 were impacted when restrictions were lifted and vaccinations became available.

Despite many states’ attempts at protecting public health through restrictions, some workers were deemed essential in many industries aside from health care, such as food and agriculture, transportation and child care. These employees had to continue working through the pandemic, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Other economic impacts of COVID come in the form of business closures. About 400,000 establishments temporarily closed in 2020, with nearly 370,000 reopening later that year, according to the Federal Reserve Board.