Wow that’s mean! Wine was what got me through it.
I would do less online shopping. Lockdown was a great opportunity to save some serious cash and I blew it on building extravagant things in my garden.
We have a large number of wine farms here. We have a decent size movie industry. What happened was that these unlikely partner industries hooked up, so the more risk-taking movie people would collect wine and deliver. (Transport of alcohol was temporarily illegal)
Microbreweries too, but I had more success with the glut of wine - we were not even allowed to export wine, which is a huge, huge part of sales in the wine industry here.
I did make homebrew beer, too. Typically Kvass, in the beginning, which is based on fermenting bread. Yeah, I was one of those instagram sourdough people, and there is a limit to how much bread you can force your wife & two young kids to eat…
As soon as it was established that the embargo on booze did not include home-brew kits/ingredients I moved on to Stouts and Ales
Wow. We had a major loosening of liquor sale laws. Restaurants that only had a license to sell on-site were suddenly allowed to sell drinks take-out. The goal was to keep as many restaurants alive as possible.
There are, on Youtube, some hilarious (yet sad, at the same time) of smugglers running in the scrub bush with huge backpacks of cigarettes. (Facebook link, sorry. Redirecting... )
One unfortunate (sorry, no immediate link, I’ll try find one) swam the crocodile infested Orange river which forms the border between Namibia and South Africa - and this is a big river - in order to buy cigarettes. The Namibian shop owner was a little suspicious of a very wet gentleman arriving in his shop, asking for several cartons of cigarettes, and alerted the authorities.
He got deported, without his cigarettes.
I think that the issue here is that a Trumpocracy would, as they did before, completely mismanage the US part of a pandemic, whereas some other countries, like here in Canada, did a far more serious and responsible job of managing it. I’m glad I experienced Covid as a Canadian, meaning I could wear a mask without getting pushback, unlike in the US (notwithstanding our stupid freedumb convoy of course)
This happened to me as well, For the first four or five months I was essentially furloughed but, thanks to our fed govt, was employed only 16 hrs per week at a proportionally reduced salary, which we could fortunately afford at the time. So I spend a ton of time on my bicycle. Once my furlough was over we were allowed to WFH until about a year ago.
“There is a limit to how much bread”???
If it were not for calories and blood sugar limitations, I would consider this statement grounds for a challenge, followed by a duel! Too much bread! And especially sourdough!!!
Excuse me, I must go off and huff in disapproval. Good day! 
There are no crocodiles in the Orange River
There are not? I mean, it is roughly at the same latitude as the “Great Green Greasy” Limpopo (of the Rudyard Kipling tale, for those who do not know the tale of How the Elephant got his Trunk"), and there are certainly crocodiles there. Most waterways in the south of the Sahara have crocodiles.
I mean, I realise this is vastly off topic, and I seem to have a penchant for that… but why would there not be crocodiles in the Orange?
ETA, wikipedia agrees with you, which astounds me. Apparently too cold.
Meanwhile, back on topic (though I do love Doper digressions), what would I do in the next plague times? Pretty much what I did during COVID: Mask, avoid groups of people whenever possible, stay home ditto, get vaxxed if it’s available. Heck, that’s how I am now. I had lunch in a restaurant yesterday for the first time, I think, since the pandemic shut everything down, a belated birthday get-together with my brother and his wife.