Last March, life was good for Cynthia Smudde. Financially independent, the 19-year-old was a supervisor at Starbucks, working her way into their education program to help fund her college tuition. Her dream was to obtain a degree in computer science and work as a software developer for the U.S. Department of Defense.
Then COVID-19 spread throughout the United States.
Although young and healthy, Smudde was still worried about contracting the disease — not much was known about the virus, and her job involved interacting with the public.
“The media kept blasting us with all this scary news, but I had to work and I had to lead people,” she says. “So I was trying to keep morale up and suppress any fears I had about it.”