Pandemic 2020

It took me a year to come back here again. For a long time in my past, I was consistently updating this site with strange rants about my daily life. Reading them now, it felt as if my life was so much more colourful back then. In reality though, it wasn't really. Strangely, life as a whole seems more...at peace now.

As I'm writing this, there's a pandemic happening in the world. The world is at a literal standstill because of a little alien looking thing called the coronavirus, affectionately known as Covid-19. Let me tell you a little more about how the world has been, and is, reacting to it.

When news broke out of the virus and its deadly afflictions, people were terrified. Nobody wanted to die (note that I used the word 'wanted' because this will have a meaning later on), so we hung on to every word that our governments, medical experts and scientists had to say. Everyone was living on tenterhooks for about...four to five months.

But recently, the situation amongst the general public seems to have changed. People seem to be getting pandemic fatigue from the lockdowns, quarantines and Circuit Breaker (singular because we are the only country calling our semi lockdown this). While the virus is still undoubtedly making its rounds, people are tired of being so constantly afraid that we are slowly but surely veering our attention away from it and refocusing on rebuilding our lives.

It's a really interesting phenomena because while everyone is still somewhat afraid of catching the virus, it doesn't seem to be affecting us (figuratively) as much as it used to anymore. People are just tired, we feel done with dealing with it, and we want our lives back. Countries want their economy back and people want to live their lives again.

I've been telling my husband that very soon, I won't be surprised if we are going to treat this virus like the common flu and deal with it the same way - herd immunity. If we think about it, there is no vaccine for the common flu either. We just live with it and pop pills to alleviate the symptoms when we get it. We never developed a vaccine for SARS too but are people still as afraid of it as they used to be? Not really. It has become a fleeting memory.

So right now, Singaporeans are just anticipating Phase 2 and the reopening of the economy to a certain extend. It really does feel like everyone has had enough. We see countries starting to reopen because they cannot be shut down for any longer. People are getting restless and everyone just wants things to go back to the way it was.

Honestly, I don't know how much of a world we have left to go back to but I'm kind of happy this happened. Why? Not because I'm some kind of insane sadist but more like I now have a reason not to communicate or get too close to humans. At least the ones that I don't like.

Let's see what will happen in the months to come. I'm predicting the world to be open again by end of this year and leisure travel to be back by mid-2021. There's no way in hell all these is going to be dragged any longer than that.