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Pandemic
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Lauren O. October 2020

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I'm 38 years old and I work in international development. When COVID was declared a global pandemic, I was in Cameroon on a work trip. I often think back to this and think of how naive I was at the time and how much has changed since then. I went on the trip on February 28th and I didn't have any inkling that I should even reconsider. It wasn't a decision that, “Oh, I'll go anyway”. I didn't even think about reconsidering my trip. I was supposed to go from Cameroon to Zimbabwe, to Kenya.

I stayed in Cameroon for two weeks and I was watching the cases go up in the US. Eventually I realized that the other countries that I was going to visit weren't going to want me to come, so I decided to come back home. I immediately left that day and it was kind of like evacuating because I didn't know what things were going to be like when I arrived in Washington and how easy it was going to be to get back home. I actually got home really easily. When I arrived at the airport I was shocked. They asked me if I'd been to Wu Han and that was it. No health questions, no temperature check or anything.

That weekend, like everybody else, I went out and I stocked up on toilet paper.

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Peter Scharff
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Keywords
I'm 38 years old and I work in international development. When COVID was declared a global pandemic, I was in Cameroon on a work trip. I often think back to this and think of how naive I was at the time and how much has changed since then. I went on the trip on February 28th and I didn't have any inkling that I should even reconsider. It wasn't a decision that, “Oh, I'll go anyway”. I didn't even think about reconsidering my trip. I was supposed to go from Cameroon to Zimbabwe, to Kenya.<br /> <br /> I stayed in Cameroon for two weeks and I was watching the cases go up in the US. Eventually I realized that the other countries that I was going to visit weren't going to want me to come, so I decided to come back home. I immediately left that day and it was kind of like evacuating because I didn't know what things were going to be like when I arrived in Washington and how easy it was going to be to get back home. I actually got home really easily. When I arrived at the airport I was shocked. They asked me if I'd been to Wu Han and that was it. No health questions, no temperature check or anything.<br /> <br /> That weekend, like everybody else, I went out and I stocked up on toilet paper.