Suddenly, Everything Has Changed: The Days of the New Normal During Pandemic

Mary Grace G. Sambo

In a blink of an eye, suddenly, everything has changed. So, how do you plan to cope up? A new stain of corona virus has been discovered in Wuhan, China before the year 2019 ended. After a few months, this newly discovered disease with flu-like symptoms was announced to be a world pandemic. Renamed as CoViD-19, this disease killed thousands and infected millions of people across the globe. As a result, most countries made some drastic decisions among their nations that impacted their citizens and the whole global economy.

Among the popular and most used terms now a days are lockdown, quarantine, hunger, checkpoints, healthcare and frontliners. Countries were forced to go on lockdowns and close their borders to foreign nationals in order to protect their people. Home quarantine were enforced to prevent the community transmission of the disease and that includes temporary closure of businesses, offices and schools. These lockdowns resulted to hunger because people cannot go outside to work and earn money and many will not be able to return to work again because a lot of businesses declared bankruptcy. Local governments implemented checkpoints to make sure the movement of people from places are safe. As what the professionals in the healthcare industry says, the virus doesn't move nor travels, it's the movement of people infected with virus is the reason for its faster spread. We surely all be grateful to all of these healthcare professionals working in hospitals and laboratories who strives everyday to stop the spread of this disease and symptomatically treat those that were infected and to all the frontliners who risks their lives to sustain the everyday needs of people and community.

But the real question now is, are we ready to face the life of what we call "the new normal"? The new normal would mean living our lives wearing face mask everyday, observing social distancing especially when outside the house and in public. That even if how much we want to hug those whom we treasure is not permitted. Because showing love these days is not by means of hugs and kisses but merely by maintaining your distance to keep your love ones safe. The new normal also means preventing thyself from touching your face especially your eyes, nose and mouth, doing handwashing before and after holding objects and disinfecting things more than the usual. While teachers’ work-from-home is their main set up. They attend seminars online and conduct remote enrollment to reach out to their learners last school year. Students, teachers and the admin have to practice how to manage distance learning and the use of other modalities . This means laptops, family computers, cellphones, radios, televisions and other means will be utilize for teachings. Lucky for those who have money to buy all these stuff but how about those who struggle every day because they don’t even have any food to put in their mouths? No parties, no window shopping, no nightlife events and other social gatherings, that is, the new normal.

This corona virus disease has changed our lives. Anxiety, fear and frustrations became the limelight of feelings. The world is somehow in chaos and people are worried of what will happen tomorrow. Many organizations and big companies are trying their best to produce an efficient vaccine and while we are still waiting, we have to keep ourselves alive and healthy and do our best to keep our families safe. Until then, when the vaccine is available, we should never lose hope that we can go back to our normal daily lives again before covid-19 came. While we continue to hope and breath, a great future ahead is waiting, still. So, now, are you ready to face the life of the new normal?

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The author is Teacher III at Lourdes Northwest Elementary School Angeles City