Monday, 16 March - Stay Away!

On Monday, March the 16th we were carrying on with our duties as usual but we could tell there was a tension in the Operations Management Office.  The routine Monday morning managers meeting was taking longer than usual and when it broke up the people we saw returning to their offices seemed in duress.  There was no normal greetings or friendly banter that we were accustomed to.

We finished our assignments for the day and headed to The Village trying to decide whether to eat in or go out for something.  Turning on the news we heard information that cinched the decision.  The covid-19 virus was upon us.  Our nearby community had confirmed cases and one hospitalization while the next large community south of us, Kennesaw, already had a death.

Later that evening, around 8:00 pm, both Cyndee's and my phones alerted that there was new email.  It was a group distribution to all the volunteers in The Volunteer Village from our supervising ranger.  It read in part; "Please stay away from the office until further notice.  More info to follow tomorrow".

On Tuesday, March the 17th with nothing to do, we decided to go do some shopping that would give us a supply to work off of for cooking at home for every meal.  Four days earlier we had gone on our routine shopping trip and were a little surprised to see food shelves absolutely bare.  We had heard about panic buying but we thought it was isolated to areas of high density populations.  It caught us off guard that the little community we are near was in full-out panic buying mode.  We were hopeful that supply had caught up with demand by now.  Wishful thinking!.

The trip to the store this time was not much better than the last.  All the things that were first to go, bread, TP, disinfectant wipes, etc. were still out of stock.  But now the meat counters were bare too.  We haven't eaten canned or boxed food since 2011, just skinless, boneless chicken breasts, fish, and no more than 6oz of a lean red meat once a week or so.  Everything else was fresh vegetables and fruit.  There was still a pretty good supply of the fresh stuff but you can only take so much of that because its shelf life is so short.  So we fell back to our old pre-2011 eating habits and added things to our cart like mac & cheese, canned chili, and canned vegetables and soup.  But to get those things we had to visit three different chain stores, Walmart, Kroger and Publix.  Even got one small package of TP at one of them.

At 4:00 pm this same day we got another group email.  This time it said that the Corps of Engineers was shutting down all public interface operations and that we were to "isolate" ourselves in The Village.  No end date specified.