The Invisible Devastating Effect of the Corona Virus Panic on Artists, Freelancers and Small Businesses
UPDATE: We wrote this piece at a time when certain information was not known yet about the pandemic and was just about to come out. Only a few weeks later we would have written the piece a lot differently. While a lot of the measures turned out to be necessary after all, we still stand by the part that the media handled the situation badly and that freelancers and artists were strongly affected.
As a kid born in post-socialist Poland, I only associated empty supermarket shelves with distant times of communism only present in the memories of my parents. It’s quite ironic that the first time I actually witnessed a similar image was through the eyes of my German flatmate, who documented her struggle of shopping for toilet paper in Berlin just last week. That instance was followed by countless others, making Coronavirus the common denominator of practically everyone’s social media feed. But there are more serious economic consequences to this general panic – some of them especially perceptible to freelancers and small businesses.
Jokes involving the sudden scarcity of toilet paper and the sales drop of Corona beer could be regarded as funny if they hadn’t been indicative of an unprecedented hysteria surrounding the virus outbreak. A hysteria that is way more widespread than the virus itself, and so far affected greater numbers of people.