Covid Stories: Jon

Like most people, I had big plans for 2020: I’d been living in Washington D.C., working at the House of Representatives and studying in law school. My family lives in London, England. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to study abroad at Oxford in the Summer of 2020.

Then COVID happened.
I remember me and some other Hill staffers getting briefed by the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response that the “novel coronavirus” was, inevitably, coming to the United States, but it wasn’t until a conference call where a CDC representative said that if we have children, we need to contact their schools and ensure there is a plan for “when they have to shut down,” that the magnitude of the situation set in.

To put things in context, I grew up in London with my mother, little brother, and a whole lot of financial instability. I went to a de facto segregated secondary school of almost 900 pupils – almost none were on a traditional degree track.

While travel prohibitions meant losing the Oxford opportunity, it also meant the Atlantic Ocean was going to keep my small, fractured family divided for the indefinite future. My mother works in the care industry with the elderly, so I felt especially powerless to protect them. The thought went through my mind that if something were to happen to her, my brother and I would effectively be orphaned.

If lockdown created an overarching sense of trying to dodge an invisible enemy, the murder of George Floyd, the way that protestors were treated, and the militarization of D.C. only exacerbated that.

Since then, I’ve been able to reunite with my family on more than one occasion. I met the love of my life, and because of COVID, we actually met on Zoom.

Learning about COVID felt like one of those collectively experienced events, like when Kobe Bryant died, or 9/11 – everyone knows where they were in that moment. By the summer of 2020, disparities in access to care, along with widespread civil unrest, made me feel like I was not just watching for stray bullets, but that people were intentionally shooting at me. I’m not exactly sure what the future holds with COVID, but all we can do is hope in the face of adversity, and at this point I’d say I’m pretty well-practiced.

My name is Jon Carter, I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and this is my COVID story.