WiNK

by: Maya Wood

From busting vaccine myths, to new mask mandates, and recently twelve to fifteen year olds getting the Pfizer vaccine, our world has come a long way since the beginning of the pandemic. Let's think back to when the vaccines were first released. We did not really know any of their effects, what to expect, or how effective they were going to be. But now after all the testing and science behind it, we can see that life is slowly but surely going back to normal a little bit at a time.

The numbers of the COVID-19 cases and the death rate have definitely gone down compared to last year when the pandemic was worse. Currently, the number of COVID-19 cases globally are at around 172 million people. In the United States we have around 33.3 million cases. With the help of the vaccines as we have been talking about, they have been a reason why the number of people infected with COVID-19 are lowering.

More and more people have been getting vaccinated since the vaccines have been released. Nearly everyone from the age of twelve and up is able to get it. Worldwide, about 1.98 billion doses have been given to the public. In the United States, about 296 million doses have been given here. But not all are fully vaccinated yet. The amount of fully vaccinated people globally is about 437 million, and fully vaccinated people in the United States is at around 136 million.

At the very beginning, commercial travel was at an all time low and many big comercial industries like Delta, United, JetBlue were suffering. Because of the lockdown, people obviously were not really allowed to travel. Now that the cases have gone down and vaccines are being produced we have seen a comeback in airline travel and flights that were originally shut off open again.

It was not just airline companies that were affected, other transportation, restaurants, stores, and businesses were going through struggles too. For example, New York subways were shut down, and lost a lot of money. Now that they have opened up again, they have been taking serious precautions such as requiring you to wear your mask and will have enforcement officers stationed in the subway to make sure they have their mask on, and they can issue fines to people who refuse to wear the mask, but that is their last resort. Back then, when restaurants and other businesses were shut down, it was a huge struggle for citizens to be able to make money. Then there were people losing their jobs and could not support themselves or their families so the government offered people checks up to one thousand to two thousand dollars. This was to help keep the US economy afloat in those desperate times. But now, we have gotten lucky for all these businesses opening back up just with different precautions such as restaurants having different seating capacities now and mask rules.

School has been different as we all know. To help deal with the academic learning situation during COVID-19, we have been introduced to online school to help students continue their learning. Online classes were stressful on both the students and teachers. But this school year, some schools were able to go back in person full time, and some did hybrid learning.

The health care workers, teachers, and all the other important workers have worked super hard to get us where we are today. They all have been extremely brave and it is nice to appreciate them for all they have done for us. Although this pandemic has been a rough experience for all of us, it has brought the community together in a way and this situation is in fact getting better. With that being said, you should still follow the guidelines such as wearing a mask and social distancing (especially if you have not gotten vaccinated yet), and if you can, you should definitely try to get yourself vaccinated, hoping for our future that we can get our lives back to normal.