Sherri Denney was in the fourth day of quarantine in her home in Springboro, Ohio, when she thought about the toll the coronavirus was taking. She sat in her recliner chair and cried as the state’s governor checked off the number of dead and sickened, knowing there would be more the next day. Overwhelmed, Ms. Denney, 55, tried to put her feelings into words.

“Wow,” she began writing on an old sketch pad, quickly realizing the precise words would not come easy. “That’s all I can say. My emotions are ranging from sadness to fear to anger.”

The week before, a woman in Nevada turned to her own version of journaling. Mimi J. Premo recorded a video on her cellphone, giving voice to a kind of stunned weariness so many Americans are feeling. And in Indianapolis, in an interview recorded by two university research assistants, a man who is diabetic and H.I.V. positive talked about how the speed and unclear ways of transmission “freaks me out.”

The three accounts, snapshots of intimate moments during the pandemic, are a response to a call from historians and archivists across the country to document this extraordinary moment in history.