Najah Hendricks is a fourth-year Social Work major, Youth Empowerment & Urban Studies Minor. Nh871270@wcupa.
2020 has come and gone, but it has still left some of its effects behind. It’s coming down to the one-year mark since COVID-19 started to make its impact: colleges forcing students home, jobs closing, hundreds of people dying daily and hospitals beginning to fill up. It’s crazy to think about where you were at this point last year, not knowing that in just a couple of weeks your life would change drastically. Some of us took the extended spring break as a way to relax and take up on some self-care, thinking that this whole lockdown would be over by the summer. Soon enough weeks and months started to pass, and we slowly became used to the fact that wearing masks, hand sanitizer and Zoom university would become our reality. I’m just glad we’re out of the fighting over toilet paper and water phase.
I remember talking to my manager at my former job last year and saying how glad I am that we’re still open as I saw people begin to lose jobs. Soon enough, my job closed a couple of days later, and I was left like many other people, some in worse situations, trying to figure out where my next paycheck was coming from. The first year of COVID-19 was filled with fear, confusion and loss of hope as the pandemic continued to drag on.
Now we still have those feelings as people are continuing to lose loved ones to this virus. Some of us have a sense of hope that this vaccine will possibly be the end to all things COVID-19. But there’s also still ignorance as people continue to refuse to wear masks in public outings, gather in large parties and not get tested if you run the risk. Now we have a whole state disregarding the masks and social distancing without even having the vaccine fully accessible yet.
The vaccine, which has only been out for a few months, hasn’t been accessible to a few groups such as pregnant women, children, etc. A plan needs to be thought of to get vaccines into all neighborhoods, including low income neighborhoods who don’t have the access to health care needs. The country’s dismissal of COVID-19 and pretending it’s going away isn’t going to bring you your summer. Yes, places are opening back up and we still have to live, but we also have to remember that some people you come in contact with have at-risk people they’re going home to. This is still a new illness that affects everyone differently.
The big question is if this pattern continues, where are we going to be a year from now?