Life was going on normally. Some were busy with studies, others with their careers, some had got engaged and were happily making wedding plans and others were busy planning their vacation or just busy doing mundane things at home. Perfect as it sounds, a virus was making bigger plans to cancel all ‘our’ plans. We could not yet pin point on what this virus was but all we knew, by December 2019, it had the power to bring an entire country, ‘China’ to a stand-still. We, who lived far away from China, checked the news with awe but continued with our normal routines. After all, a virus cannot travel so many miles, we are definitely safe! The virus had a laugh and very well might have thought to itself ‘wait till I catch u’.
Today this virus is a household name and no conversation in the dinner table is complete without its name being mentioned at-least once. Yes, we are indeed talking about the coronavirus or COVID-19. By 2020, it started spreading to all parts of the world and in January, 2020, World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. But the virus was not yet happy and had bigger goals of becoming a pandemic. So has the virus achieved its goal? Till a few months back, most people would have had to look into the dictionary to know the meaning of the word ‘pandemic’. Today the pandemic has become one of the most commonly used words. In March, 2020, COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic by WHO and as per WHO, “a pandemic is the worldwide spread of a new disease.”
While initially we were taken off guard, we the humans are accustomed to adapt to every circumstance very well. We caught up and found out how to break the chain of spread. Everyone by now, from a child to an old man knows the importance of social distancing, wearing masks and washing of hands frequently.
If we could overcome the cholera pandemic, the plague pandemic and the Fiji measles pandemic way back in the 1800s, today with better medical and research facilities, we will definitely be able to overcome you ‘coronavirus’. You can laugh at us now but with the number of people recovering from you, increasing every day, we ‘the humans’ will have the last laugh and will bid you a good bye!