By Zehra Khan

The world was moving at a fast pace till the sunset of 2019. Everyone was gearing up to bid farewell to 2019 and busy making new resolutions to welcome 2020. Like every other year, every country celebrated the start of 2020 with fireworks displays, but who knew that this year would mean lockdown, quarantine, and would bring COVID-19? With every passing day, the COVID-19 outbreak spread throughout the world, and this easily transmitted virus was so contagious that this engulfed thousands of lives in the first quarter of 2020.

There was a large segment of people who were not ready to accept this bitter reality. People came up with different conspiracy theories to deny this fact, but as the COVID-19 cases increased and Italy recorded more than 800 death toll of COVID-19 per day, that built fear amongst all, and the world went into lockdown. This lockdown altered the course of the global economy and ravaged the financial market. Apart from other consequences, the biggest one was the global shock that lasted its impact on supply and demand in the interconnected world.

Extreme uncertainty is all over for health and economic revival. This pandemic was a challenge for modern medicine as well. There was no cure to treat infected people. While doctors and scientists started researching the best possible treatment, the world introduced new practices to control the spread of this deadly virus. Every country put several restrictions to prevent the spread of COVID-19 within communities and requested its people to keep physical distance from one another, maintain proper hygiene by washing hands properly, and most importantly wear masks. Everyone witnessed that the countries who followed the set rules to reduce their spread were successfully defeated and became COVID-free. On the contrary, countries that failed to practice it are still bearing its consequences in the shape of the COVID-19 second wave.

It took almost a year to develop the COVID-19 vaccine with lots of testing to bring it to the market. Currently, the vaccine is available in advanced countries to frontline workers and most sensitive people, yet there is no evidence to prove that it would eradicate this virus for good. Now experts are questioning if this pandemic would become endemic.

COVID-19 gave lots of lessons to the entire world, where everyone was in a Marathon race busy chasing their dreams and achieving their goals but the pandemic outrun the world by freezing all its activities. People had forgotten the true meanings of human needs for one another, so it brought families together, fostered relationships, revived family values, and taught that people who have lost their loved ones due to this deadly virus are an irreparable loss for them and a lesson for the rest.