St. Joe’s contacted us, saying the
pandemic’s getting out of hand.
And then we all went virtual.

-Walt Bryz-Gornia ’21
Undergraduate Student
When I was stuck in my house and my mom was actually a nurse at a hospital. When she would come home from work, she would have to take a shower and we couldn’t hug her, well we chose not to hug her just because she was around patients with COVID.

-Cassie Hahn ’21
Undergraduate Student
I stopped working for maybe two weeks and then
when I came back everyone was fully masked.

-Frankie Antonucci ’24
Undergraduate Student
When I came home, my dad’s immunocompromised, so my parents were stocked up with masks, canned foods and different things during that spring break, and I was like,
“Oh, this is serious.”

-Kella Pacifico ’21
Undergraduate Student
My mom ended up getting COVID from one of her co-workers, actually the first week or so that quarantine started. Her business partner went to a dinner party in New York, right before the country shut down. Her, and I think 23 other people at the party got it and then she brought it back to my mom’s salon that she co-owns with this business partner. Her and a couple other employees got it. Having someone that had COVID close to the beginning of all this was definitely very scary, and definitely put COVID into a different perspective. It
was a real thing at that point that it was actually in my house.

Ray Zuhowski ’21
Undergraduate Student
I’m moving stuff out of my office and just one moment after the next thinking “This is changing my life.” There was a period in the spring when a lot of us in higher ed were commiserating and saying, “Are we still going to have jobs in the fall? This is
scary. This is scary.”

John DiCarlo
adjunct professor of English
My birthday was in April, so it was almost a month after. That was the first time I saw all my friends. They all did a drive-by for my birthday, and I haven’t seen that many people, literally, since I was on campus, and I couldn’t hug anyone.

Ali Chapman ’22
Undergraduate Student
I remember my wife saying we
should really go to the food store
and stock up on food. It was
amazing to see the line of people stocking up on supplies and I
thought, “wow, this is this real.”

Tom Fithian
director of major gifts
While I was studying abroad and I heard that
APEX got canceled and people were being
sent home and I knew of so many other
students abroad who were being sent
home. By that point it hadn’t hit
Australia yet, so we didn’t really think that we might have
to go home. And then our
program was canceled and
I was flying through many
different airports trying to
get home.

-Lexi Mignogna ’21
Undergraduate Student
When we went into lockdown, my dad actually got COVID and got really sick early on, and that right there hit hard and I realized that this was gonna change my life.

-Patrick Bronander ’24
Undergraduate Student
The night all the sports leagues
shut down, it all happened once
one night.

-Walter Cronin ’21
Undergraduate Student
Watching those news reports, particularly in New
York, where people were taking cell phone video
out of their windows and there were just constant ambulance sirens, that was very memorable and disturbing. We didn’t hear as much of
that where we live, but seeing it in New York and
then hearing these stories of overcrowded emergency rooms and so forth. That was when I think I
knew it wasn’t going to be a sudden improvement.

Richard Haslam, Ph.D.
associate professor of English
I had been following the pandemic through the news after it first hit in China. The online New York Times showed paramedics wearing hazmat suits taking the sick to the hospital. I would give my classes a daily update on what was happening in China because wearing hazmat suits is not needed for just the flu.

Patricia Bobo, M.S.
visiting assistant professor of mathematics
Probably when I had to move out of my house because my dad is a doctor so he didn’t want us to be around him, just in case, because he was working with COVID patients.

Julia Tristine ’24
Undergraduate Student
As classes started online, I realized I wasn’t
liking it as much as I liked in-person classes. I really thought it was going to be over
in two or three months, but here we are one
year after.

Sammy Ramos ’24
Undergraduate Student
When everything started
to shut down and we were
on lockdown. I had never experienced anything
like that in my entire life,
especially school. When we
were in school and Zoom became a worldwide known thing,
that was definitely when I was like
“Wow, something is going on.”

Simone DePiano ’24
Undergraduate Student
When I was watching the news. It was in
Italy and trucks were just rolling
out dead bodies, no coffins
or anything, and I realized
that life was never gonna be
the same. We were all gonna have to take precautions
and take it more seriously

Donald Sullivan ’23
Designer
At first, we started with 15
days to slow the spread. Fifteen days had passed and
then a month had passed by
the end of April, things were
only getting worse and that’s
when I realized this would only
get worse before it gets better.

Jackson Crutchfield ’24
Undergraduate Student