111 There was a hundred and more days of summer vacation…
Carl Pimentel
And school was SUPPOSED to come along and end it (like the Phineas and Ferb reference? No? alright). It was SUPPOSED to be two weeks, but turns out, we had 154 more (which adds up to 3 years). I think we can all collectively say that experiencing COVID was… something.
Personally speaking, as some ninth grader who was just beginning to get a feel for high school, the timing was unbelievably horrible. Meeting new faces and growing relationships with the teachers was all ruined by some disease that spread insanely fast.
It was all about staying home, wearing funny blue objects on our faces, and strictly enforcing ourselves to remain 6-feet apart (as if we really followed that 24/7). Ninth grade was all about just staying home, eyes glued on the screen as we students “learned.” Tenth grade rolled along, and a new rule was introduced where students could choose to stay home or actually go back to school (with the safety precautions in place, of course). I absolutely HATED online learning – I couldn’t bear to watch my teachers yap; I either slept or just played video games instead of tuning into the lesson. So, what did I do? That’s right,
I chose to stay at home.
I damn near begged my parents for me to go back to school, but majority ruled in favor of me staying at home, and surprise, surprise, I ended another year of high school by simply pressing a button on my laptop.
Two solid years straight of just waking up, eating, opening and closing my laptop, then back to sleep.
Rinse and repeat.
This eventually stopped around my senior year of high school (2022-2023), when things were FINALLY getting back to normal. Mandates and rules progressively got lifted.
I want to expand on that whole virtual learning thing. I could (and would GLADLY do so if I had the time) sit here and write a well-published book about how miserable my experience was with virtual learning. Did I gain anything besides learning about the lesson material? Absolutely not. I, and other people my age, would all agree that our patience, time management, use of devices, and attention spans all worsened within that period of time.
And those effects are being carried into today. As a university student, I always see at least 10 people (including me) in lecture either:
- Shopping online
- On their phone
- Playing Tetris, or some game from the NY Times website
Even right now as I’m writing this, I’m literally watching a YouTube video of someone playing a video game. I’m not saying that it’s not my fault. All I’m saying is that if it weren’t for me being essentially forced to stay at home and just rot in bed on my phone or sit in my chair and play video games for hours on end, my patience, time management, use of devices, and attention span would’ve just remained as it was pre-pandemic.
Enough of expressing my disgust towards virtual learning. I want to move on to talking about my life (in general) during COVID – namely, some notable blame and stigma towards the disease. As if it wasn’t bad enough, across every platform on social media, you would’ve seen people that were anti-vax or pro-vax doing some sort of protest or heated debates which turned into shouting matches. Personally, I did get COVID (according to the 2 Rapid Antigen Tests I took. I wasn’t properly diagnosed by a medical professional, so keep that in mind) despite getting both vaccines. But I’m not radically anti- nor pro-vax – I’m just worried about my safety and the safety of others. Luckily, none of my other family members were infected; we did take HEAVY precautions to ensure that no one else would be infected. When I admitted to showing heavy symptoms of COVID to my friends over a video call, most of them just wished that I got better soon, which I appreciated. What I found funny was some people’s genuine reaction ,acting like they needed to move to another country just to be safe from me. At the time, COVID was spreading at alarming rates, sure, but that didn’t mean that I was a mindless zombie trying to infect others. I just found those reactions insanely hilarious, but it also led to the point of division I made earlier. Nine times out of 10 would I be asked if I took the vaccine right after I admitted to showing COVID symptoms. If anything, it made people more anti-vax, which also lead their skepticism and distrust of the government and health officials to grow.
So, to the scholars studying COVID 100 years from now, I hope you take into account the divide of the world during COVID’s peak. The impact of social media is huge now, and I am confident that this impact will be exponentially larger in the future. Skepticism against government officials and medical professionals (in this case) will always be a constant. So, if anything, COVID’s peak should at least be a benchmark for the amount of skepticism in people’s minds. Aside from medical and technological advancements, I feel like there are bigger questions that should be addressed:
How can we come to a compromise of trust?
Can people feel somewhat confident in the government’s ability to handle things instead of feeling like they’re forced to trust the authority and its laws?
All I hope is that, at the very least, there’s some degree of progress towards this.
