It is still hard to imagine how fast did this coronavirus spread globally. Since the first case was reported almost three months ago, there are at least 0.85 million cases reported in the world so far. Including the coronavirus outbreak, we did witness a lot of events that we might consider impossible, did happen. This was an illustration of the butterfly effect.

Many countries and governments have requested the residents to stay at home in order to achieve the goal of social distancing. Back to two months ago, which was the period of time that the number of cases was climbing up in China, social distancing had been taken effect in Shenzhen. I cannot tell you precisely how successful it is to implement this in the infectious disease area, but I felt more or less that I wasn’t so good mentally those days.

My dad is a Respiratory Physician with 28 years of experience, and my mom is a nurse in Rehabilitation area. This emergency made them very busy. I can clearly remember that I spent the first day of Spring Festival alone at my home. Never tried, and it didn’t feel so cool.

My mood started to explode when the first case was found in the hospital which my parents’ work on. Soon later, the community close to my house found another case. I started to worry about if my parents could keep them safe in the hospital. They didn’t have enough masks, protective goggles and protective suit and this made me more anxious.

Too much anxiety caused insomnia. Those days I slept at 4 am and got up at 1 pm. I hoped to see them earlier after I got up. I hoped they were both safe. Even they always came back to home at late night that period of time. Till the middle of February, the situation in Shenzhen got better. My parents finally could take a day off after the busy work.

Guess what? My mom started to become my mom again – she was a bit nagging! Though I understood she witnessed many cases with her own eyes and she worried about my physical health, I still felt tired about this. I locked myself in the room, cooked for myself and didn’t talk to anyone.

I talked to my BFF often but via WeChat. Those days, I didn’t meet any friend in real life (actually yesterday I visited my friend who was the first friend I met after Jan 20). This was suffering, right? In late February, I could feel that I was depressed in the home.

I started to seek for some interesting tasks to achieve. The first target was to go to the top 100 in a game ranking, Identity V. Frankly speaking, it took me at least two weeks to achieve the goal but I made it! Most significantly, I felt relaxed.

Playing games always will cause a negative effect physically, indeed. So I watched Mavericks’ matches when I didn’t want to play video games. The things turned to be extremely serious when the NBA announced all matches would pause at this stage. I couldn’t play basketball in the court because all courts were still locked at that time.

Luckily, my new semester started and commenced online from late February. Then I turned my concentration to my studies from then on. I have to admit distant learning is helpful but low efficiency, at least for me. I set 40 minutes was a timeslot and there would be a 20 minutes rest between two timeslots. This dramatically improved my studying situation.

Till now, the situation of coronavirus of Shenzhen goes better, even though some imported cases still make people worry about. However, I found a system to keep myself mental health under the coronavirus outbreak. I am sure I will do it better when another emergency happens next time (I wish there will not).

Just want to share my story with all of you. Some of you may hold a negative perspective on this coronavirus outbreak. But I would like to say, those people standing on the front-lines are taking the risks to sacrifice themselves to save our planet, why can’t we make some efforts to collaborate to beat the virus? If you feel not good mentally, talk to someone. If there is no someone with you, go find some interesting things to do. If there is nothing attracting you … there should be something attractive for you, I promise!

Stay home, keep distance, stay strong. And our healthy planet will return in a moment.

The article was originally published on Linkedin, on April 1, 2020 by Yuhao Sun.