If I survive for 36 more hours or so, I’d be one of the survivors of 2020. This Christmas and the New Year’s day should be extraordinarily remarked by the lucky ones who didn’t die of Covid-19. This is not an exaggeration as I see my infected friends screaming for help even on a totally irrelevant group chat. The best words I’ve heard this year was that in order to survive this pandemic, we must evolve faster than the virus. This couldn’t be too true. Last Christmas holiday, I made an hourly schedule so I would not waste an hour. However Comparing it to what I had to go through this year, I still could have speeded up. I’m writing this for the last Romanian lesson of 2020. In 2020, roughly I wrote about 100 pages of essays in Romanian language in addition to the letters to the President of Romania. I still can learn. I still can be better.
I think many of us had a similar experience this year. Some of us had to move to a country side, some of us had to go through severe Covid-19 symptoms. On the other hand, when I look at the news, I have more and more questions about what they are saying. It took the media almost one year to report the actual number of the infections were possibly 10 times worse than officially counted in Wuhan. The new research says nearly half a million people were infected in Wuhan based on the antibody test conducted last April.
If the rest of the world knew this number earlier, they might have taken a different approach. However the probability was not high. The most nonsense words in 2020 was “Don’t cause a panic”. Numbers of alarms and early studies were deliberately trashed and ignored because of this slogan. The problem of this slogan is that it lacks the clear definition of a “panic”. We don’t know what this slogan is trying to stop, so someone who alarms the risk is blamed for undefined reasons. The actual meaning of this slogan is nothing but “Don’t scare me”. It’s not a slogan but merely a whining.
After all, nobody is going to take any responsibility. China, Wuhan officials, people who blinded us by the slogan “Don’t cause a panic”, they are all free. The latest argument to escape from a responsibility is held between the UK and South Africa. The new strain of Sars-Cov-2 was found in these countries and none of them wants to be seen as the origin. Apparently the UK is losing in the argument and when we call the new strain, it’s already called “the UK’s mutated virus” officially. We are strictly not supposed to call Sars-Cov-2 “China flu” because it’s discriminative, but the new strain is officially called “UK mutation”. The UK has approved the new vaccine of Astrazeneca and the university of Oxford. In the previous trial, their vaccine marked the better score among the volunteers who were mistakenly given only half a dose. They started over the new trial a few weeks ago, and the vaccine is already approved. Both the efficacy and the adverse reactions were seen only for a few weeks. Nothing is starting to make sense in the world today.
When we look back this year, it is obvious that we should have taken this more seriously. The governments should have passed the law bill immediately by March to suspend all the payments for 3 months. The bills for electricity, gas, rent, mortgage, all of them should have been suspended for 3 months. Food and basic drugs should have been publicly distributed during the period. Lockdown should not have been a joke. Then Covid-19 would have been the past by now. We were not brave enough to stop for 3 months. Because we could not stop only for 3 months, the damage is continuing and worsening.
People say 2020 was a terrible year. I think now the possibility is even that people might say 2020 was a good year compared to the following years. We are on the verge to make 2020 the best year among the following years or really a terrible year in history.
