AS THE New Year recently unfolded, we are experiencing a surge in the number of cases of the Covid-19 virus infection. We hope that it is not a déjà vu of what has happened since the virus was discovered in China in 2019 and its massive onslaught in 2020.
The year 2020 was a year of fear as the death toll continuously rose in different parts of the world. The virus has claimed numerous lives and infected many. It paralyzed many countries’ economies, affected industries, livelihood sources and the lives of mankind.
There was no vaccine yet then as pharmaceutical companies raced towards finding solutions to the pandemic. Good thing now, there are vaccines that were proven to be effective at least to the original Covid-19 strain. Sadly, there is the Delta and now the Omicron that were the results of virus mutation. The new strains are said to be more deadly.
We cannot simply forget the year 2020 since our generation, the present generation has experienced it for the first time since the Spanish flu. The latter has claimed lives, too, but with little information on the said pandemic since there are not many documentation materials for such.
At the height of the pandemic, we first experienced using face masks and shields almost wherever we went. We experienced staying in our homes due to quarantine protocols that were imposed by governments. It is not wartime but we saw empty streets and public places, closed establishments and of course, panic buying.
Such situations seemed to be scenes from apocalyptic movies where what will happen next is very unpredictable. We cannot do away with it but have to live with it until the pandemic still persists.
As we are in the year 2022 now, we are hoping that said experiences would not happen again. We are hoping further that the pandemic shall cease and we shall live the lives we had prior to the health menace.
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During New Year’s eve, there were not many fireworks that were lit up. However, there are other new noisemakers that irritated most of us perhaps. The ingenuity of Filipinos gave way to motorcycle riders removing their machines’ mufflers, thus, when revved up, created noise to high decibel levels. While we were simply merry or noise-making while welcoming the New Year, the noise created by these motorcycles was so awful. Local governments should look into these.
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