COVID-19 Doesn’t hear a prayer.

Its been a year and seven months since the announcement of a worldwide pandemic, COVID-19. People needed to be isolated from each other. Others couldn’t leave their homes unless they needed to buy essentials for the house and avoid getting sick. Many schools and businesses had to close up shop and transition to online learning via Zoom. Places deemed essential stayed open like Groceries, HealthCare workers, and some restaurants, while some had to close up.

Many churches had to close their doors to the public. They knew that if they opened the doors, it would lead to many people getting infected, and the church would be blamed for it. According to the Crosstown website I used, the community of Van Nuys has 4,019 as of the last year used. For this report, I want to explore how many attendees have been affected by not attending church in person and how they transition to online services and if they had to adjust to these new changes in their personal lives.

I will approach this report I am working on by asking people from the church I used to attend. I want to hear the voices of my community, and I want their voices to be heard from my reporting. I want to write about this project we are doing in class. It seems like old-fashionable journalism on reporting.

For the most part, my community is Latino, and it seems they are forgotten in the news. There is a lack of coverage about the community of Van Nuys/Sherman Oaks in a recent report. Van Nuys/Sherman Oaks is in the middle of each other. Van Nuys isn’t an area that is considered middle class but lower class. In comparison, Sherman Oaks is middle class.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any information on churches closed and how it’s affected people in their day-to-day lives at all.

Questions I would ask for my assignment are:

1. How has COVID-19 affected your day-to-day life?

2. How have you been able to keep up with the word of God with no churches opened?

3. What did you think about the pandemic when it first started?

4. Have family members have gotten sick from COVID-19?

5. At any point, have you thought of abandoning your faith in God because you couldn’t attend church during the pandemic and lockdowns handed in the county of Los Angeles?

I have been able to ask important questions from my interviews, and I was given personal and honest answers. Thankfully they didn’t give me the typical yes or no. They showed real human emotions; I genuinely felt connected to them.

My project is mainly about religion and COVID-19 and how this ugly pandemic affected those physically and emotionally. Also, to see if they could hold on to their belief and keep faith alive during last year. Sorry professor, for nothing has any information for you on this assignment; it was challenging to find something.