March 9, 2020.
Just another manic Monday…until it wasn’t. The President of the Community of Madrid held a press conference stating that the entire education system of the Community was to close on Wednesday, March 13. This was due to Coronavirus, now called COVID-19. She held the press conference in the evening and didn’t say anything else.
March 10, 2020.
Talk about a crazy Tuesday. With the news of school closing down, many parents didn’t send their kids to school. The students who were there were all jokes and laughter, thrilled about being on ‘a coronavirus vacation’ and having no homework. The teachers were in a frenzy, all questions and theories and ridiculous conclusions. Nobody had received official word from the government. All we knew was that we were going into a 14 day confinement period. My school was not prepared. Although technically there is infrastructure to hold classes online, many teachers hadn’t tried it, let alone explained it to their students. Some teachers went crazy printing out worksheets and booklets, others checked to make sure they had all their students’ emails, and others seemed to be preparing to go into Spring Break mode.
Then, roughly ten minutes before the end of the school day, teachers started receiving emails. We finally had an official document with guidelines for the confinement period. Students were to stay home and teachers were to continue to work from their schools. Individual schools had the option to decide whether they’d allow teachers to work from home. Apparently many of our teachers have children who would’ve ended up coming to work with them – completely defeating the point of sending kids home – so our Principal made the call to allow teachers (and Auxiliares) to work from home. Now…what that meant, nobody knew.
We didn’t receive guidance on how teachers were to conduct class, how grades would work, how exams and projects would be carried out. That meant nobody had any clue as to how people in my role were supposed to respond. We normally give presentations via PowerPoint, create games or have conversations. None of us knew what this meant and the administration gave us no guidance.
March 11, 2020, Day 1 Quarantined in Madrid.
Knowing that all schools – including Universities – were closed, the general population started to freak out. Panic buying had already started in the UK, and it seemed Madrid was to be the next European hub for the virus, after Italy, who’d been quarantined for some time already. By close of business, several large companies identified infected employees and many made the decision to send their employees home. Smaller companies began testing their infrastructure to see if they could handle sending their entire workforce home; some couldn’t. This was my official first day being quarantined in Madrid.
March 12, 2020.
Talk about a wild Thursday. People (one roommate included) fled Madrid, leaving for their larger country houses or summer homes. The general consensus and advice was to start isolating immediately, because a national lockdown was next. Grocery stores ran out of nearly everything.
March 13, 2020.
At this point, most businesses were closing and sending employees home. My second roommate went to his hometown. That evening, the President of Spain declared a national state of emergency, meaning the national government had ultimate control over regional governments and could take any measures deemed necessary to stop the spread of the virus.
March 14, 2020.
The powers that be met (it’s a Democratic Monarchy, so it had to be a Royal Decree) and made the lockdown official. What was meant to be a press conference at noon turned into an evening press conference as the entire country waited in front of their TVs to finally get the news. And it came, hard. The country’s state of emergency is essentially a government and possibly military takeover, if it gets that far. The hard and fast rules are basically that all nonessential travel (meaning any time you leave the house) is prohibited and punishable by fine or possible jail time. All nonessential business were instructed to close.
March 15, 2020.
This was the first day the city felt silent. What’s normally quite a busy, loud city was quiet. Streets were about half-busy, but parks were empty. At one point the silence was almost deafening.
Still Quarantined in Madrid.
Since March 15 it’s been a whirlwind. I do wish I’d kept a bit of a diary, but instead I have the daily to-do lists I’ve made to help me keep track.
Realistically many people will recognize the following week as the first week of craziness for them. That was the first full week of a nationwide lockdown. Being quarantined in Madrid and basically being told from the previous Monday that this was imminent, I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience, observing everyone from above. My day one of isolation was March 11, earlier than most in Madrid, mostly because I assumed isolation would be relatively easy for me and I was going to avoid getting sick at all costs.
If only I’d known what was to come.
