by Ghannon Gray-Edel, 06/03/2020, Gaylord, Mi

Middle School 6-8 Category

It was March 23, 2020. Michigan Governor Whitmer just called executive order 2020-21, otherwise known as the shelter-in-place act, closing all non-essential services and enacting a lockdown. Little did she know, the damage was already done, at least for me. My friends already had the virus… One was even in the hospital. I wished I could visit him, but hospitals closed visitation due to the virus. I had wondered what was so special. It’s just another virus. We don’t close the entire world because of the flu. I asked everywhere, but I always got the same response: “This virus is too new, we don’t know much about it.” The virus started hitting everywhere. For all I knew, I could’ve had it. Family started getting it. I had close family members I hadn’t seen since the previous 4th of July. I started seeing the news, but most of it was false information, or at least skewed. People started fights over the toilet paper. They started riots, for seemingly no reason.

The quarantine kept getting extended. My friends kept getting it. One almost died. The hospitals ran out of ventilators, and we didn’t have enough tests. I saw on the news that South Korea had mobile testing stations, and wondered why we couldn’t. The stores started running out of everything. Stores started to shut down until they got new shipments. I was asking myself, why are people doing this? Don’t they know that if we all just listen, this will all be done within about a month? Why don’t people have masks on? Do they know that they give them away? I asked myself, why did the school spend a half a million dollars to set up remote schooling? That seems extensive. They spend $125k on teacher laptops. Do they plan to use them next year? What about bigger schools? Do they have this kind of funding?