Graphic drawn by Natasha Leong
I got the news of the coronavirus from social media, not realizing how bad it would be until it suddenly came upon us. I work at a bank, so I constantly come into contact with people. The bank was like everywhere else. Nobody had time to really do anything, but we knew that we had to start protecting ourselves first. It all happened real fast.
In the beginning, nobody wore masks, but everyone in the bank was still working. Since the bank is an essential business, as everybody depends on money, we continued to work. We were all really scared, especially working with money. Truthfully, we were afraid of contracting the virus and dying. In the bank, none of us talked to one another and we all worked quietly. As the virus began to spread throughout the country, more and more people were rushing to take their money out of the banks. A lot of people were withdrawing their money— from $1,000 to $8,000 to $10,000. It was mainly the older generations who were taking out money from the banks. We were also very busy because we had to help many businesses and transfer multiple loans.
Another difficulty we had to deal with was having to constantly wash our hands. I mean we had to wash them about a hundred times. Because the virus could circulate on currency, it was necessary for us to wash our hands, even though we wore gloves. The soap that we used was a special kind of chemical soap. It could help kill the virus, but our hands were being affected. I was also personally worried about my own health from the chemicals that were constantly being circulated and used in the building to disinfect everything. But I guess everything has good and bad. For example, you take medicine and you feel better, but there are side effects. You can’t see inside your body.
I think it’s quite interesting, because this pandemic has shown that perhaps switching from paper currency to online currency might be more beneficial to us in the future. This is just an idea, but many other countries have switched to using online payments for almost everything, transferring money though apps on smartphones, instead of paper currency.
This pandemic has been very bad for the economy and honestly, this pandemic has gone too far. The whole world is suffering.
—Mckayla
Written by: Ellia Chiang