Life in lockdown: This Georgia native is on coronavirus ‘house arrest’ in Spain.
Ciera Crowell saw videos weeks ago of people in China ordered to stay in their homes to slow the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak.
She thought, “Wow, this is crazy.” She figured it unlikely that something like that would happen to her in Europe.
But for nearly a week now, Crowell, 29 — a Macon native and Georgia Tech graduate who for much of the past decade has lived in Barcelona, Spain, where she works as a virtual reality researcher — has been living under a government-imposed coronavirus lockdown.
After an explosion of cases in Italy and Spain, workers there have recently been told to work from home. Then late last week came the order to stay indoors unless going out for things like groceries, medicine or walking pets. Violators, Crowell said, faced fines or arrest.
The lockdown may last two weeks or more.
“There’s no real certainty of how long,” Crowell said the other day in a video interview with The Telegraph.
She said she wanted to share her experience abroad as a possible primer for people back home in Georgia, where the coronavirus outbreak has led to school and business shutdowns and could, in coming days, prompt officials to take more drastic measures.
To get by and pass the time, Crowell has been updating her dog Calçot’s Instagram account, doing in-home workouts, focusing on work and connecting with friends on social media. She joked that she wishes she had more comfortable pajamas.
Meanwhile, she and fellow workers get in touch at 10:30 a.m. each day as “a social necessity,” she said, to check in with each other and say hello.
“It’s gone from being a moment of ‘what do we need to get done today?’ to ‘how are you doing?’ and ‘how was your night?’” Crowell said.
Reaching out to others on Facebook and seeing some of the creative things they are doing to cope has made the days manageable for her. “It’s like, ‘OK, I can get through this.”
“The whole country’s on house arrest essentially,” Crowell said. “If you walk out, a policeman’s going to come up. ... But it’s been pretty peaceful since this has started.”
The “freakout” among some locals, she said, came in the days before the lockdown when people flocked to supermarkets.
Her father and grandmother are back home in Georgia and Crowell, a Tattnall Square Academy graduate, wants them and the rest of her family to know she is all right.
“No matter what they see on the news about Spain or Italy,” she said, “we are fine and we are getting through it.”
Still, she wonders if people in the U.S. are fully heeding the warnings.
“I don’t know if they’ll follow the rules or not,” Crowell said. “Here, it was probably about two weeks ago when we weren’t really taking this seriously. And now, no matter what we do, it’s a bit too late because everything has been spread.”
Through the hardship, she said, people in Spain seem to have pulled together.
“We live so close to everyone else. It’s like, ‘OK, what’s good for them is what’s good for me,’” Crowell said.
“People have really gotten on board and it’s been kind of surprising to me because we do tend to have a lot of protests. ... But everyone’s been like, ‘This is really important, we really need to get inside and we need to pay respect to the people who are older or who are sick.’”
This story was originally published March 20, 2020 at 7:00 AM.