Before the Virus

Before the Virus

Before the coronavirus, we lived a charmed life of social interaction and the freedom to leave our houses. We took it for granted. It was the norm, the world as it had always been. No one thought anything of touching their loved ones. We came and went as we wanted. “Quarantine” was a word seldom used outside of hypothetical scenarios and isolated incidents nobody thought would ever happen to them. The world was built on people interacting, people crowded together. Gathering and interacting was always the norm.

Nobody foresaw weeks into months where we would be sequestered in the confinement of our own homes trying to avoid any risk of catching a life-threatening infection. It probably never occurred to most people that hospitals would come dangerously close to running out of necessary equipment meant to protect its workers and save lives. We thought we were safe. We thought those we loved could keep coming home to us just as they always did, that nothing like this could ever happen. No one thought life would just stop. When it did, we were so unprepared for the effects of it that for all intents and purposes, the world around us was in peril.

Socially, we were divided by the long-reaching effects of the virus. We couldn’t just venture out without a thought to what dangers there were anymore. Our only means of leaving the house came in the form of needing food and medical care in this dire time. When we left, store shelves were running empty, people wore masks and avoided nearing each other. It was like scenes out of the apocalypses we had seen depicted in movies, only real and terrifying in how much it threatened to take from us.

Before the virus, personal freedom and walking out into the world without caution were things we never thought would be lost to us. There was little to no risk of anyone becoming infected and dying from everyday contact. Our apocalypse came sooner than any of us ever expected, in a different form than the zombie movies we watched when movie theaters were still open promised in their vision of a destroyed future. We learned that things were more finite than we ever could’ve realized. We saw that in the worst of times, some people cared more about themselves than the danger they posed to others in leaving home. Pushed to our limits, we had to make sacrifices and reevaluate the necessity of things we once took for granted. We had to learn how be selfless in our actions, to put aside our need for the world as it was in normalcy just to keep those we loved and the people they’d interact with safe.

The coronavirus did more than separate us. It challenged our perspectives on a safe world where we were free. It required us to ask ourselves to let go in the name of doing what was right for society as a whole. Nothing the world had yet faced affected our way of living as much as the novel coronavirus. We lived as we wanted until it threatened the safety many thought was simply a given. Worst of all, it divided people in more ways than just the physical. Asian people saw the blame shift to them as ignorant masses treated them as carriers of this indiscriminate virus. Suspicion became the norm. Because we all lost our freedom and safety, the need for blame arose in the worst of us. The new vision of the world we were forced to take on was more divided than ever.

In the year 2020, we faced a crisis that held us apart. We closed and locked our doors, covered our faces, avoided everyone we could be distant from. We learned to let go because we had no other choice. The very notion of what it meant to be free became more precious than it ever was. Our world changed fundamentally, changing with it our view of what was necessary just to ensure everyone else’s survival. Coronavirus is a chapter in the world’s history that will be remembered for years to come. It was the pandemic that reshaped society and enforced a new normal we weren’t yet ready for. So much of how the world moves forward will be informed by the impact the virus has had. In this desperate time of seclusion, we must learn how to proceed in ways that protect everyone, our society now revolving around caution rather than the normalcy of social interaction.