All tagged COVID-19 pandemic
Billy Hendrix, a 30-year veteran of the funeral industry, thought he had seen it all. But the last few months have changed his mind. He says he has experienced ups and downs in the business over the years. But he said he’s never seen anything affect what he does quite like COVID-19, which has put some funerals on hold and limited which services can be offered.
“Sometimes we feel defeated — that we’re not giving our family everything that we should and we’re restricted to some degree,” Hendrix said.
Peter Dale, a restaurateur and chef born and raised in Athens, had never seen anything like it. On Monday, the streets of Athens were empty. The University of Georgia’s campus was silent. Restaurants like his, usually busy with the lunch rush, sat quiet and mostly deserted.
“That kind of made it a little scarier,” Dale said. “Because we knew that something was coming.”
Before traveling to China in late January, Holly Bik and her husband watched countless news reports and read as much as they could about the novel coronavirus, which had been detected in the country a few weeks earlier. After weighing the odds, the couple went ahead with their travel plans. Things would be fine, they figured. They weren’t going to the heart of the outbreak.
“It wasn’t until we actually had gotten to China that everything blew up in the media, and . . . the scale of the problem really became apparent,” recalled Bik.
