The worst tour of my sex working career took place roughly ten days before New Zealand entered our first COVID-19 lockdown. I had booked non-refundable flights, and wasn't sure if I should go at all, torn between a fear of catching the terrifying new virus which was sweeping Italy, and a different but no less pressing concern that if we went into a lockdown for an unspecified period my income would dry to a trickle. My phone was quiet. Clients were exercising their own selfpreservation instincts, and I decided that going out to socialise was risky. Instead, I sat in my hotel room scrolling the endless news updates on my personal phone, occasionally checking if my work phone had ding’d without my noticing. The experience of the pandemic in New Zealand was undoubtedly different to that almost anywhere else: our initial lockdown was astonishingly successful, bringing the number of community cases back to zero. The experience of doing sex work in New Zealand is also quite different to that of doing it in most other places in the world, with the industry having been decriminalised for nearly twenty years now. The experience of endlessly scrolling the news during the March– April 2020 period was evidently one which I was not alone in, with research confirming this phenomenon both quantitatively, and highlighting the qualitative dimension of what came to be called ‘doomscrolling’.