INTRODUCTION TO COVID-19

My name is Oluomachukwu Anaenugwu and I am a black girl originally from Nigeria. I am 18 years old and currently a sophomore studying public health with a minor in Biology. At the beginning of this year 2020, I enrolled in a class called CPH 201: Introduction to Public Health. This class was taken in the peak of Covid-19 and this class covered epidemiology which is the basically the study of patterns of disease occurrence and the factors affecting those in factors. This class covered terms like pandemic, quarantine, incidence rate (number of new cases), prevalence rate (total number of cases) and mortality/death rate. Therefore, the pandemic acted as a real life example/application of the concepts learned in the class. That is all I took Covid-19 for at first, a real life example, not until we transferred fully online after spring break that I knew this was very serious. 

As an international student, when the school moved fully online we received an email that stated "all undergraduate students must be moved out by noon on Friday, March 27." 

I was panicking because I had no idea where to stay or what to do and all this was happening while classes were transitioning to an online format so this was a recipe for confusion and disaster. Thankfully, it turned out that we could still stay in the dorms. My plan right from the beginning of the second semester of my freshman year was to go back home in Nigeria to spend the summer with my family but due to the Covid-19 situation the trip was postponed till June with the hope that the situation will be better. June came by but the situation had gotten worse. I still wanted to go back home but my mum didn't want to risk my health and also the Covid-19 situation had gotten worse back at home. Even if I tried my very best to go home, all the borders were closed. I ended up spending summer alone in an apartment close to campus. The major way covid-19 changed my life was the increased number of times my mum and family called a week to check up on my mental being and health. I can say the closest I think I have come to Covid-19 was when I took a trip this summer to Atlanta (a Covid -19 hotspot with about 100,000 cases as of July).