With a statewide lockdown in place, the government hopes to slow the spread of COVID-19, and while students understand it is for the greater good, the struggle of not being able to see anyone makes it dull. Many students went from seeing their friends on a daily basis to not being allowed to see anyone nonessential. 

“It has been a month since I have seen my friends and it feels really weird not being able to see them because they are my emotional outlet. If I was really stressed, I would hang out with friends, like laugh and unwind to stay positive, and now I can’t really do that,” freshman Imaan Shakoor said.

Students like sophomore Kimberly Portillo are used to being very social and interacting and hanging out with friends in and out of school; now, being in quarantine is very difficult for them and comes with a completely changed lifestyle.

“I’m a very social person and not being able to see my friends has been rough, but I’m still keeping myself isolated. I used to see my friends everyday and now I never see them, so it is a really big change,” Portillo said.

To keep in touch with people, most students use social media such as Snapchat to see and talk to their friends. To many, social media is the only sense of normal right now.

“I am mainly FaceTiming and snapping my friends because social media comes in really handy during quarantine. I FaceTime almost all of my friends everyday, like at least three friends a day because I can’t really go a long time without talking to them and it makes it feel like a regular day sometimes,” Shakoor said.

While many students are eager to see their friends, they understand that doing so right now would make things worse and extend quarantine. 

“I don’t know when I’ll be able to see my friends again, but I know that until people really start distancing themselves, quarantine will be longer than just another two or three months,” Portillo said.

Some people such as Shakoor believe that quarantine will and must go on for a much longer period of time and that it is the only way to keep people safe even though it makes life a lot different for them.

“I hope I will be able to see my friends once quarantine is over but that probably won’t be for another 18 months so we won’t have a second wave where more people will die, which I get will be hard to stay home, especially without in-person contact with friends, but [it’s for] the greater good and saving lives is more important than our need to go see friends,” Shakoor said.