In the second week of March, writer-producer Shawnda Christiansen went to the nearest department store in Sacramento to shop for supplies. As she was adding essentials to the cart, she thought she'd pick up toilet paper later. Four days later, on March 13, Arlene Barshinger, who lives in Irvine, 15 minutes away from Disneyland, rang her, suggesting she stock bog rolls. "With most shelves empty, there was nothing left. I was shocked at how suddenly things had escalated," recalls Christiansen, 50. Until then, the state of California had recorded 198 cases of Coronavirus and four deaths. It weren't the statistics that were alarming for its 40 million population, but that Disney had announced the closing of its theme parks across Florida and Paris. "It's rare for Disneyland to shut its doors," says Barshinger, 49, a line producer. In 1963, they shut for a national day of mourning after President John F Kennedy's assassination, then during the Northridge earthquake in 1994, and on the day of the September 11 attacks in 2001.

This historic moment needed to be recorded, the duo felt. This would be their second project after they had first met during the filming of Junkie, a 2018 movie on a real-life addict's transformation and hope. "The idea was to document everything we saw around us—from discussions on conspiracy theories to people blinded by political vendetta claiming Democrats are fabricating this to mess up the elections, and obviously the sudden impact of the pandemic on our routine life," Christiansen informs. There were conflicting stories on social media. "While some were filled with terror, most others compared the symptoms to a regular flu. Slowly, everyone realised how we are all struggling with the same thing, just that some countries were having it tougher. For instance, some countries did not run out of toilet roll supplies," laughs Christiansen, who is also a substance abuse counsellor.