The virus caught us at an incredibly inconvenient time. We were lucky in the sense that my husband was in the second-to-last batch of immigration interviews. So his legal permanent resident status was a go, whereas very early into the pandemic the government shut down and indefinitely postponed all cases.
Even in Alaska, there were just _loads_ of people who were trying to immigrate legally, and all of them are now stuck in a limbo until USCIS and Homeland are back in business. (We couldn’t even get Homeland on the phone a few weeks ago, so telling them ‘hey, we’re moving’ is enough of a no go that we functionally *cannot* change our place of residence/mailing address until they’re back)
Our ‘plan’ had been for him to find some work until summer, to rock the summer fishing gig, then go to another state until next fishing season. Now, even if we _do_ make plenty of money fishing (questionable, depends on if restaurants and processors are working), then it isn’t even a certain thing whether we _can_ go to another state (flights are much more expensive, and domestic air travel is very hard to manage (quarantine where? Quarantine *how*?)... to say nothing of trying to rent a place, or buying a small bit of land and finding a vehicle to park on it).
Alaska was already in the red since Saudi Arabia started driving the price of oil into the ground... but now it’s losing tourism for the summer, potentially all of its fishing income, and oil isn’t worth anything
That leaves... mining? Logging???? Farming??????? I don’t see how Alaska’s going to make it out of this happy: we have to ship in near-all of our food anyhow...
TLDR: It’s been incredibly inconvenient, even though it doesn’t matter to me if I go outside or not. It *could* be extremely bad, but it isn’t unlikely that I’ll be stuck wintering here again... and sometimes being rent free just isn’t worth the trouble.
Extra tidbit: the virus changed the Department Of Motor Vehicles significantly too, so getting my drivers’ permit changed into a drivers’ license will be a bit more of a challenge than I’d strictly prefer.