Governor Newsom has recently announced a new mandatory lockdown, virtually eradicating all outside-related holiday activities. The question is…what now?
Renee Cheung
Staff Writer
We have done it again folks, pat yourselves on the back! California coronavirus cases have exponentially shot up again to a record high of 28,000 new cases in just a week. With this new accomplishment, we have been rewarded with another stay at home—right before the holiday season. As unemployment and despair peaks right along with the new COVID-19 spikes, middle-class families scramble to find ways to keep their holiday spirit alive locked inside their homes.
On December 3rd, Governor Newsom had no choice but to enforce another mandatory stay-at-home order in hopes of curving the drastic spikes that are present this week in California. This means that many non-essential businesses are now closed down, forcing California residents to stay cooped up in their homes this winter season. Phoena Ma (8), reflects on the recent turn of events.
“ I’m not really surprised about the new lockdown…the cases are still pretty unstable… it’s better to get it in control as soon as possible. Because businesses… are kind of in a lot of pressure… and a lot of other countries have …COVID cases pretty much under control,” said Ma.
Many families are extremely disappointed as this new lockdown has negatively affected travel and vacation as airports and hotels have been heavily restricted and even temporarily shut down until early next year. Ms. Christensen is currently an English teacher in American High School and is quite distraught because her regular plans had to be canceled this year because of the urgency of the new lockdown.
“We usually go to my aunt’s [during]…Christmas and Thanksgiving. It’s up in Sacramento because we don’t really see them very often. But we made the conscious decision not to because we have a lot of cousins that are…younger kids, and we don’t want to give the [virus] to them…Our family usually goes to Disneyland for Christmas or New Year’s and we had to cancel those plans.”
Other students are a bit more used to spending time at home during the holiday season. Kavin Goyal (11) who is currently following the stay-at-home order remarks, “It’s going to be the same as Thanksgiving where we just eat food with the family. No one else is gonna come in. I think the only thing that’s special this holiday is sort of like the food, you know, intimacy with the family. And like, that’s it, you know, just like being in the house and chilling,” said Goyal.
Unfortunately for some families, buying Christmas gifts and going out for ice skating is their last concern. Ms. Christensen notes how the pandemic has affected her family’s life financially stating “My dad and my boyfriend both work… So for those two months, or a month or so, where it was complete shutdown, they didn’t get paid at all…We are not going to spend like all this extra money as we used to [on] Christmas-We don’t really know what the future is going to look like so we want to make sure we’re financially stable no matter what comes at us.”
After nine months of boring and isolated quarantine, many students are starting to reminisce over how they used to spend the holidays when the phrase “COVID-19” was completely foreign. When asked about what she misses most about the holidays, Ashley Buntrock (12) says “I really wanted to go ice skating this year, I used to go every year, and I just want to have Christmas Eve dinner with my entire family.”
The sudden exponential spike of coronavirus cases in California near the very end of the year displays the United States government is at protecting their citizens and controlling a deadly and contagious pandemic. While keeping businesses’ regulations relaxed may seem like a good way to keep up profits during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is doing quite the opposite. Thousands of employees have been laid off, and millions of dollars have been lost because of the incapabilities of the president and the government. This new lockdown that was released by governor Newsom was very much necessary looking at today’s current conditions, and now it is much too late to save businesses—big and small—from going bankrupt.
The only thing we can do now is to wait out another grueling stay-at-home order and hope a successful vaccine will be created and mass-produced for the public. Until then, we can only patiently wait inside and spend time at home…once again.
Eagle Era 