Getting Back To Life
It has now been over a year since COVID-19 was announced as a pandemic level disease.
It has been over a year since the first lockdown when teens around America and the world took on TikTok, going for family walks, and virtually no contact with those outside their immediate family besides Zoom phone calls.
It has been over a year since we began masking up and social distancing.
It has been over a year since schools sent kids home for an extended spring break which turned into what would be to some students the last day they stepped foot inside of their schools.
Though optimism can sometimes lead to disappointment, many around the world are taking comfort in places like Australia who have virtually no new COVID-19 cases, and have been living almost normally. Though, Australia relied on several more intense measures to get to this accomplishment than other countries that have not yet matched.
However, in recent days, America has marked 32.2 million cases of COVID-19 nationwide and 573k precious lives lost. This all as cases are seemingly falling but the COVID-19 cases rate still remains alarmingly high.
Hope cannot be lost though as the COVID-19 vaccine is being seen as a way to eradicate COVID-19 and return to life as we knew it.
As of today, about 30% of America’s population has been fully vaccinated. From the CDC, “Wearing masks and staying 6 feet apart from others help reduce your chance of being exposed to the virus or spreading it to others, but these measures are not enough. Vaccines will work with your immune system so it will be ready to fight the virus if you are.”
So one can only hope by the combination of wearing masks, social distancing, and vaccinations will hopefully bring back even a sliver of what we’ve known.