Covid 19 coronavirus: Being a good roommate - the dos and don'ts

After a week of wearing pyjamas all day in their Atlanta apartment, Naomi Nagel and Michelle Topping decided they had to do something. Photo / Audra Melton, The New York Times

Living with a roommate has always included some drama. But these days, once petty grievances about cleanliness or visitors have morphed into arguments over safety.

For nearly a week, a single flight of stairs in a two-story home in Rolla, Missouri, became a no man's land — the only thing that separated the sick from the healthy. On the dozen or so steps, the healthy roommates left takeout orders and paper plates, and the sick ones returned used plastic utensils and other trash from their bedrooms.

And if any of the three coughing residents thought for a moment about wandering downstairs, a wooden cornhole board placed on the fifth step blocked their path.

When Marco Cisneros, 22, moved into that house in central Missouri last month, all five roommates had free rein of the four bedrooms and shared living spaces. They cooked meals together. They stayed up late playing Mario Kart.

But then one roommate began coughing. Another one got a fever. Soon, three of them were sick. Fearing that their roommates might have the coronavirus, the two healthy roommates banished the sick ones to the second floor.

"The day we moved them upstairs, we sanitised the whole house," Cisneros said recently of his roommates' quarantine. "I never thought to sanitise door handles before this, and now I'm sanitising door handles."

Marco Cisneros points to the upper floor where his ill roommates were recovering. Photo / Marco Cisneros via The New York Times

Living with a roommate has always included some drama — fights over dishes, shared bathrooms and cable bills. But with more Americans testing positive for the coronavirus every day, millions of roommates across the country have been forced to rely on people they may barely know to keep them from getting sick, in some cases entrusting their health to strangers they met on Craigslist or through mutual friends.

While the pandemic has brought some roommates closer together, for others, it has turned petty grievances about cleanliness or visitors into arguments over safety.

Across the country, nearly 20 million people live with nonrelatives, according to Census Bureau data. Among people ages 18 to 34, in 2015, 1 in 4 lived with roommates, a figure that included young adults who lived with relatives who were not their parents, such as siblings.

In interviews, people afraid of contracting the virus from less careful roommates said they were fervently cleaning surfaces, keeping toiletries in their rooms and removing shared items, like phone chargers, from common areas. Some have fled apartments for family homes, saying their roommates' nonchalance put them at too much risk.

In Seattle, navigating the new normal of isolation has been exponentially more complicated for Eliza, a community organiser who lives in a house with nine others. Before the coronavirus, the intentional community felt like a big family. Now it is a source of anxiety — and possible infection.

"We all have different definitions of what social distancing means," said Eliza, who asked that she not be fully identified to avoid tension with her housemates. One housemate was still going to an office last month, and another recently had three friends over to watch a movie, which "made me very uncomfortable," she said.

And then there is the issue of hours upon hours suddenly spent together — in the same shared space.

With stay-at-home orders issued in all or parts of 45 states, many roommates who were accustomed to seeing each other only briefly in the morning or after work are now home together, in many cases working remotely, taking business calls and participating in video meetings.

About 40 per cent of working-age adults are working from home because of the virus, a figure that is higher among the wealthy, according to the Pew Research Center. With roommates now doubling as co-workers, some have tried boosting morale in their new home offices — which, in many cases, is simply the living room.

Food is left on the stairs for Cisneros's ill roommates. Photo / Marco Cisneros via The New York Times

Naomi Nagel and Michelle Topping, both 26, said that after a week of wearing their pajamas all day in their Atlanta apartment, they decided they needed to do something that would force them to change clothes — and lift their moods. The best friends created a "spirit month" calendar with a different theme for each day — including "ugly sweater" day and "fancy Friday" — and the effort has caught on among their friends, who have sent photographs of themselves following along.

When Topping was laid off from her job at a law firm during the pandemic, the spirit calendar and photographs gave her something to look forward to each morning.

"It was really helpful," she said. "Losing my job sucks, but this is a little bit of a distraction."

The altered state of living has also put more novel living arrangements to the test, such as that of Kristin Accorsi, 33, who lives in Freehold, New Jersey, with her husband, her former husband and a child from each marriage.

When the pandemic grew more severe in March, she told her former husband, who usually spends about two nights a week in the house's "in-law suite," that he should go to his other apartment in Brooklyn and hunker down. But within a few nights, after watching his roommates traipse in and out of the apartment and as cases spiked in New York City, he decided to return to the family home, she said.

Since then, there have been a few sticking points: Accorsi, a teacher who also writes a blog about her living situation, said her former husband has a tendency to talk on speaker phone, for example, and she has been doing much of her family's dishes and laundry.

Still, the unusual circumstances also have their perks. Her 8-year-old son has been happy to see his father every day, and everyone has been somewhat amicable, at times surprisingly so. Sometimes, after Accorsi goes to sleep, the men stay up to watch anime on TV.

"I would say my ex and my husband get along better than I get along with either of them," she said, laughing.

For Cisneros, in Missouri, the coronavirus upended much of his life. Last month, he was working at a movie theater in Springfield, Missouri, his hometown. The pandemic caused the theater to close and cost him his job. He filed for unemployment last month and, after weeks of hearing nothing, he began receiving payments last week. His original plan to apply to a local Walmart is on hold, as the job feels increasingly hazardous.

"The Walmart is still hiring, but I'm too scared to work there, especially because my roommate who worked there potentially has coronavirus," he said earlier this month. A few days later, one of his roommates tested negative for the virus, bringing everyone in the house a measure of relief.

Now Cisneros spends much of his days cleaning. He wants to be at home with his mother, but she has a rare lung disease and he worries about bringing the virus home, even if he has no symptoms.

• Covid19.govt.nz: The Government's official Covid-19 advisory website

Although he never could have anticipated the arrangement in his new house, Cisneros is grateful to be with some of his best friends, and glad they never turned on each other when they were all stuck upstairs for nearly a week.

Even once one of the roommates tested negative for the virus, Cisneros and the other healthy roommate did not take any chances.

"We had them stay upstairs another day just to be safe," he said.

The dos and don'ts

Bad roommates can take a toll even in normal times. During a pandemic, they can drive you up a wall.

With many people working from home, and nearly everyone limiting their trips outside, roommates who may usually see each other only before work or in the evening are suddenly crammed together in living rooms, kitchens and narrow hallways.

Suddenly, you're counting on that friend of a friend or that roommate from Craigslist to help keep the coronavirus at bay. And aside from the new anxiety between roommates over safety, the pandemic is aggravating arguments that have long plagued shared living spaces, including those about dirty dishes, cable bills and cluttered bathroom sinks.

Think things are going swimmingly in your apartment? Then you may be the one at fault after all.

Here are some tips to make sure your habits aren't sending your roommates to stew in their bedrooms.

Social etiquette

DON'T

• Attach passive-aggressive notes criticising their hygiene to a container of wipes and leave it in front of their door.

• Keep playing the same horrible song on repeat.

• Take on a new instrument without properly soundproofing your room first.

• Vape products that supposedly smell of coconut rice but actually smell like a dentist's office. It's bad for your lungs anyway.

• Take long showers. Three roommates. One toilet. Not everyone has a bladder of steel.

• Cook copious amounts of garlic. We're not warding off vampires.

• Force or guilt your roommate into your latest TikTok routine. It's not going to happen.

DO

• Ask if anyone wants a drink when you go to make one for yourself.

• Ask how your roommate is doing like you really mean it.

• Create a balanced routine of alone time and common activities.

• Replace the roll of toilet paper if you were the last person to use it.

Safety

DON'T

• Go outside multiple times a day and expose your roommates and yourself to the virus.

• Forget to wash your hands regularly.

• Invite friends over. Really, you'll be OK and save everyone a lot of drama.

• Continue to lick your fingers to turn a book page.

• Think the living room is your personal gym.

DO

• Cough and sneeze into your elbow, even if you swear it's just allergies.

• Disinfect door handles, countertops, laptops and cellphones.

• Build a contingency plan in case one of you gets sick.

• Wash your clothes regularly.

• Stay at home!

Work life

DON'T

• Forget that other people may be on a video call before you act stupid behind them.

• Ask your roommates why they are wearing fancy pajama bottoms on a Zoom call.

• Hog the Wi-Fi by downloading video games.

• Take calls in a common space.

DO

• Use headphones. It's a simple trick that makes a world of difference.

• Put on a Zoom background if you are video calling and your roommates could be visible in the background.

• Leave outlets available for other roommates in the common space who are working.

• Respect quiet hours (typically 11pm to 7am on weekdays).

Written by: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
Photographs by: Audra Melton
© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES