What Happened When COVID-19 Got Real in Belgium?- Autumn Hinze

I woke up on Thursday, March 12th like I do every morning - disoriented. This time, however, something different was happening. My phone was buzzing nonstop and there were too many messages and emails to make sense of. I walked into the hallway and realized that it wasn’t just that COVID-19 was being taken more seriously, it was that we were being sent home from Belgium.

I was heartbroken and disappointed, and I couldn’t get my parents on the phone.

Then it hit me. How was I going to tell my internship? When my friend and colleague Kristyn woke up, we decided to go to work for the last time and say goodbye in person.

We got on the bus, then the tram, then onto the metro, taking it in that this was our last time. Everything was empty and eerily quiet.

When we walked in, the only people there were two account managers and we broke the news to them. We were so disoriented and shocked that it didn’t feel real. I went upstairs and grabbed my soy milk from the fridge and sat on the couch and waited for everyone to arrive.

Slowly, all of our work friends started trickling up to the kitchen and the news took all of them by surprise. I wiped tears away as I sipped my soy milk and talked to everyone about what came next.

Finally, our supervisor came in and we met with him about our future. He said he liked the fact that I was crying because that meant I valued my time at 87seconds. It was nice to laugh when we felt like everything was falling apart. We decided that there was no reason to stop working together, and we offered to work from home in the states.

As we are a video content agency, a lot of the work depends on traveling, filming in person, and businesses being open. Unfortunately, this means that 87seconds can’t perform much of its essential functions. However, there is a lot that they can do, including animating, reworking existing footage, and putting out messages of persistence and positivity for some of the companies who are pushing through this pandemic.

I was talking to one of my colleagues this morning and she told me Belgium is essentially on lockdown and that everyone is just trying to stay safe and that the curve is flattening. Luckily, Europe is taking this seriously. Everything in Italy is terrifying, and I am surprised these lockdowns did not come sooner.

There have been around 7,500 deaths in Italy and about 75,000 infected. That’s a lot of the infected who are dying. Our Belgium program was sent home roughly two weeks after the Italy program was, and the US is about two weeks behind Italy in number of deaths, while we are almost neck-and-neck with them in diagnosed cases.

That means they are dying more frequently of the disease in Italy, probably because we got an extra two weeks of warning and treatment knowledge. With that being said, no one in Belgium seemed especially concerned toward the end. Some big cities like Paris and Germany were getting worse, but no one seemed to really think it was our problem in Brussels.

Oh, how times change.

Hopefully, Europe didn’t respond too late. The UK is struggling to get a handle on their number of infected, but we will only truly know what “too late” means when this is all over.

My thoughts are on all of those who are infected and their friends and families, and I can’t stop worrying about those who are going to find themselves without enough to carry on with all of the businesses closed in the US and Belgium, as well as all over the globe.

Donate blood, donate to your local food banks and medical workers or to the World Health Organization. There are a million ways to help.