Liverpool, England

Abby Meysenburg and Adam Rothschild

Abby Meysenburg and Adam Rothschild are students at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts in Liverpool, England. They share an apartment together in the heart of the city, and have been social distancing together for about two months. They are both living in the UK on student visas; Adam is from South Africa, and Abby is from the United States. They talk about what life in the UK is like right now, the government’s response, and graduating into uncertainty. 

When did things start to change?

Adam: The major turning point… Abby and I were at a gig on the 12th of March.

Abby: At that stage, everything was still open. But I think that was the first time, you could kind of, I don't want to say feel it in the air, but like something's about to go down. Like life is about to change dramatically. And that was also the same day that Trump put the travel ban on Europe, but not the UK. 

I guess, yeah, that was the last day where I think we all kind of felt like any second they might announce something. Anyway, a couple of days off to that, I was still getting called into work at my university. Which was a little bit weird, cause like I kind of felt like I shouldn't have been going because I wasn’t sure how safe it was.

I think we went into official lockdown on the 23rd [of March]. There was, I'd say probably about a week, of the government essentially saying, ‘yeah, don't go to pubs, clubs or restaurants... but pubs, clubs and restaurants stay open.’ 

So it was this contradicting information of like, stay home, but stay open. And that created a really rough situation for businesses because they couldn't activate their insurance policies for coverage on government ordered closures. 

They can do takeaway, but most of them aren't because they're doing something here called a furlough scheme. The government will pay your employees wages if you're not open. So most places are just closing so that the government will pay them. 

At this point, restaurants are all still shut. 

On St Patrick's day, all the clubs were still open. I remember walking home that night. I was hearing like music and people everywhere here in Liverpool. 

It was, as they say in Liverpool, “chocka”.

What does “staying home” look like in Liverpool?

They say that you're only allowed outside for like one hour of government mandated exercise every day, but that's just not policed at all. So I mean, if you go to any park there's still loads of people.

We're now allowed to go out for exercise multiple times a day. And we can… relax in parks.

I think July will be when bars and restaurants and stuff open at reduced capacity. I mean, we had 500 something deaths yesterday and like 3,200 new cases. So we're definitely still in the thick of it, unfortunately.

I do think, particularly young people, are still meeting up. 

We’ve had to say to a lot of our friends, like, nope, we're not going to meet up with you for a walk. It's really difficult to be the ‘strict dads’ of the friend group. 

Us as a household, we’re probably taking it a lot more seriously than others are. That's partially because I guess both of us are pretty…. like... responsible citizens. But also just because we've been really busy with [school and work].

How do you think your experience in the UK has been different from other countries?

In the UK, the government's communication strategy feels a lot like propaganda. “Clap for the NHS”, for example. So every Thursday, we're supposed to like, applaud outside of our windows for the frontline workers in the hospitals and stuff. And obviously those workers are the ones getting hit the hardest. 

Whenever they communicate about this, they talk about it as if [frontline workers] are kind of like wartime heroes. But in reality, it's questionable whether the government hasn't essentially just pushed them under the bus through things like underfunding the state health care for the last 10 years, or like just not dealing with this crisis in like a more proactive way. 

So, yeah, people are quite critical.

Especially where we are. We live in the Labour stronghold of England, which is like the equivalent of Democrats, and we have an equivalent of a Republican government right now.

At the end of the day, the UK’s strategy from the beginning was the idea of like, herd immunity. So people just have to get infected so that we can… get on with our lives. I guess it's kind of too early to say whether that's really been effective. 

[The U.K.] is taking a more relaxed approach than the rest of Europe, and I think for all of the cons of that, I think there are some pros. As we begin to reopen, we may not see as big of a spike as Spain is seeing, because people are still having some contact with each other. Whereas, you know, in other countries it's been completely boxed off. So of course, as soon as you have any sort of interaction, you're going to see an increase [in cases].

How do you feel about graduating from university during this experience?

It's quite scary. On top of what is naturally quite a scary time, you know, graduating from university. It's already quite anxiety provoking, so to do it in the midst of a crazy global recession and a pandemic... I can't tell if it actually takes some of the pressure off or makes it worse. 

But I mean, either way, I'm really looking forward to hopefully seeing a couple of my friends in the next few weeks at least. And just to try to have a little bit of fun, because for the last two months I’ve been getting up every day, sitting at my desk, working, seeing my housemate Abby for like 10 hours straight every single day. I'm hoping that I can kind of shift up my routine. 

I said to someone that I ran into the other day [that] I haven't seen another human in like two or three months. And he said, ‘What happened to Adam?’ And I said, Oh, he's still here with them. After you’ve been with them straight for 70 days, they just don't count. Well, not that they don't count, but like, you know, you get it.