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An empty dorm room. A quiet drive home. A late night in front of the television. Most people have that one specific memory from the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic — the instant they realized that the virus wasn’t just a blip on the radar but a serious disaster with far-ranging consequences.

The Daily Orange spoke with six Syracuse University students about the moment they realized the extent to which COVID-19 would reshape their world:

Ryan Bell

For Ryan Bell, the pandemic started when the music stopped.

Bell, an SU freshman in the College of Arts in Sciences, was rehearsing for a musical at his rural Massachusetts high school when news of the pandemic reached him. It didn’t strike him as serious until his school announced that the show was canceled.

“I wasn’t really scared of it at first,” Bell said. “But things got really real when we were doing the show and we realized months of efforts got put in, then all of a sudden things just stopped.”

The cast performed one recorded version of the show in masks, and then it was over. After that, Bell said he never went back to his school in-person.

Chris Hippensteel | Asst. Digital Editor

He remembers going home and watching as the case numbers and death toll rose, slowly coming to the realization that the crisis would last for a while.

“It was weird having a personal part of my life just kind of vanish forever,” he said.

Aliya and Ayana Herndon

As a magazine journalism major in the Newhouse School of Public Communications, Ayana Herndon remembers reading about the pandemic in class.

The virus seemed far away to Ayana then. It was something happening in another country, but it wasn’t an issue in the U.S.

“Two days later was March 14, the day they told all of us to pack our things and go home,” said Aliya Herndon, Ayana’s sister, who is from the Bronx. “It was crazy because we were talking about it like it was just a lesson. It felt far removed from me. Then it was in my life.”

Like many other people, Aliya remembers stocking up on cleaning supplies and frantically disinfecting every surface she could during the pandemic’s early days.

Ayana had been planning to attend Newhouse as a graduate student when she and her mom came to SU to pick up Aliya. She never imagined the virus would still be raging when she began her graduate studies.

“I did not think that I would be a grad student at Newhouse during the coronavirus,” she said.

Julia Slattery

Julia Slattery imagined flying back to Syracuse after her two-week spring break was over and returning to life as normal.

 

“We got put on the two-week hiatus online, and I thought, ‘Oh, how bad could it be?’” said Slattery, a junior information studies major. “I thought (the virus) was mostly overseas.”

Slattery was in Florida during spring break last year. The severity of the pandemic didn’t hit her until some family members back in Florida began calling her and her parents to warn them about the surge in panic-buying and the impending lockdown.

Chris Hippensteel | Asst. Digital Editor

When she returned to New Jersey, the state was in chaos, she said. Her family scoured Amazon for essential items. She had to drive into Brooklyn to get her brother so they could quarantine as a family.

“I wasn’t that worried about it until I got home and everybody was in complete panic,” Slattery said.

Martin Brennan

For Martin Brennan, the realization was gradual.

He watched the first cases crop up in the U.S., then in his home state of New York. Then, his construction job started requiring him to wear a mask and practice social distancing on site.

“Construction’s not usually a place where you do all that. You’re not usually very clean,” Brennan said. “Then you had to put on gloves, wear a mask.”

As the first lockdown mandates came down from the state, Brennan, a sophomore in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, slowly came to understand the toll the pandemic was taking. Weeks later, his county, Rockland County, became one of the most-infected counties in the state.

Jillian Durand

Jillian Durand said she began worrying about the pandemic before most of her peers.

Coming from a family at high-risk of facing severe complications from the virus, her parents warned her about it early on. Her dad stocked up on essential items weeks before the rest of the country started panic-buying, she said.

Chris Hippensteel | Asst. Digital Editor

“When everything shut down, (my dad) sat me down, had a huge talk with me about it,” Durand said. At the time, she had just returned home from Syracuse to Los Angeles for what would become a very prolonged spring break. “It really — not scared me — but I realized how serious it was.”

Published on March 15, 2021 at 11:34 pm

Contact Chris: cjhippen@syr.edu