Los Angeles-based Kiwi Rosie Carnahan-Darby wrote the above Facebook post because she wanted her friends in New Zealand to know the reality of daily life in the United States.
She's now written a piece for The Spinoff to the same effect - 'Back to normal'? Yeah, right.
Rosie Carnahan-Darby Photo: Rosie Carnahan-Darby / Twitter
Carnahan-Darby, her husband Rhys Darby and their two sons have lived in Los Angeles for ten years.
When the schools closed there in March 2020, they returned to New Zealand. Fifteen months later - in May this year - they returned to Los Angeles when Rhys got a job.
At that point, there were only around 100 new cases of Covid-19 a day in Los Angeles, Carnahan-Darby tells Jesse Mulligan.
"I was really scared about coming back because we weren't vaccinated and we had a child under the age of 12 who is like a magnet for bugs. Everyone else gets a cold, he'll get bronchitis… so it was nerve wracking."
Rosie, Rhys and their 15-year-old son got vaccinated soon after they landed.
In June, Los Angeles lifted Covid-19 restrictions but Carnahan-Darby and her family kept wearing masks to protect their 11-year-old son and save him from feeling like the odd one out.
When Covid-19 cases then exploded to 1,000 per day in Los Angeles, she felt like they'd made a mistake, but now the family has settled into a new way of living.
Some people in Los Angeles are "willing to play Russian roulette with their health", Carnahan-Darby says, but her family has been doing a lot less socialising since they returned.
After a year and a half of pandemic life many people in Los Angeles are more reserved, she says. No more backyard parties.
As a mum, Carnahan-Darby is glad that the current protocols allow her kids to feel safe and remain relatively safe.
Their school has a 100 percent vaccination rate, kids are masked throughout the day except when eating, are socially distanced by plexiglass and receive weekly Covid-19 tests.
"It didn't occur to me that [New Zealanders] didn't realise that [in the United States] we wear masks all the time and the kids are tested constantly…
"It's a new type of freedom. It's a new way of living where you're constantly living with this worry about whether the person next to you or walking down the street has Covid."
Photo: AFP or licensors
