My family has been moving blindly through these first couple of weeks of being in lockdown. It’s weird having my mom and dad home all day. In my normal, prepandemic life, they’d usually roll in from work around nine PM, with a box of food from the fancy Apple campus cafeteria to feed me for dinner. Now our kitchen is our only source for sustenance. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that if we’re hit with dizzy spells or stomach cramps or notice a bumpy rash starting on our abdomen, we should lock ourselves in a room for ten days and not go to the hospital unless symptoms are extreme. But isn’t “extreme” kind of subjective? What if someone has a higher threshold for discomfort, and they end up collapsing in their living room when the whole time they should have been at the hospital hooked up to an IV? We all have so many questions, but all the information we’re receiving feels frustratingly vague.

On top of all that, I still have to meet my due dates in all my AP classes, but it’s nearly impossible to concentrate on homework when our lives are hanging in the balance and even epidemiologists and elected officials don’t know what to do. This is why I’ve spent the past three hours doomscrolling about Adema and other plagues that predated it. I’m supposed to write a paper on Pearl Harbor, but the only piece of history I’m interested in researching right now is the Spanish flu. Worldwide death toll: fifty million people.

What good are a century of medical advances if we apparently don’t have enough hospital beds in this country to keep the sick alive? And how am I supposed to maintain my GPA and get into Harvard when I can’t stop thinking about the fact that most of the people who will likely get sick and die will be my age? Older people are getting sick, too, but their symptoms seem to be relatively mild so far. Just my luck that a pandemic that impacts young people more than old people would hit when I’m a young person. In the distance, I can hear my mom frantically refreshing her phone between business meetings, hoping a delivery window will open up from Lunardi’s Market.

“C’mon…” she keeps saying over and over again.

My dad insists he can make a quick trip to the store. He’ll wear gloves and bring hand sanitizer, but my mom snaps back that it’s not safe. The virus, after all, is airborne, and we’re still waiting for our face masks—which my dad should have ordered weeks ago—to be delivered. Being trapped in a house together has made them short and testy with each other, and it’s made me wish I could return to a life where I felt like I practically lived alone.