Life in the time of COVID-19

Life for a lot of people has changed pretty drastically over the past few weeks as the COVID-19 virus takes hold in the US. Several states have enacted “Stay home” emergency directives, while others like South Carolina are trusting its residents to maintain social distancing. Based on what I’ve seen on the news and the few times I’ve had to venture out to shop, that seems overly optimistic.

A few weeks ago, my wife had us start monitoring our body temperatures twice a day, which seemed like a good idea. Then a few days later work issued a mandatory requirement for all employees and students to start self-monitoring for COVID-19 symptoms. Monitoring for symptoms at least gives people a window of time to figure out where and when they might have been exposed. I’m lucky to have a wife who’s so proactive and stays on top of things like this.

On my end of things work has encouraged anybody who can work from home to do so. Although the majority of my work can’t be done from home, I took advantage of being able to work from home to get caught up on writing up reports that should have been done a few months ago, but got put on the back burner so that I could get caught up on the equipment testing. Now that I’m finally caught up on the reports, I can move on to start getting caught up on other things like the mandatory annual training modules and earning more continuing education credits (didn’t get many last year because of being so busy and I’m starting to run low).

After discussing the equipment testing situation with my colleagues at work, I also decided to temporarily suspend the regular equipment testing to reduce the chance of me transporting COVID-19 around work and also to reduce my risk of exposure. It will mean scrambling to get caught up later when things start getting back to normal (whenever that ends up being), but I felt it was a prudent thing to do.

With a reduced work workload and working more from home, I now have the opportunity to spend more time on my PhD work. With the majority of my Monte Carlo simulations completed, I’ve been going through the data and doing some analysis on it. Now I can spend more time doing that and start writing up my results. I have until September or October to cobble my thesis together, and that time will no doubt go more quickly than I want.