The New Norm

Aunty Babblings 0 1021

I am told that I babble and it has gotten worse with the pandemic and as I age! I figured that instead of my verbal babble maybe putting down these confused and excited thoughts may have a point. After all, baby babbles turn to language at some point. 

With the pandemic and no work to boot, it gave me a lot of time to question the goings on in the world. These thoughts are not based on research but just an Aunty Babbling away.

The “New Normal” What does it really mean?

There is a virus called Corona

It’s Latin for crown or wreath

But is it a crown?

Or is it a wreath for the death of us?

It’s really up to us.

The global Covid-19 pandemic has caused chaos all over the world. Just think about it, a single virus particle so tiny you’d need special equipment to see has shown us how fragile the world we’ve built really is. It’s blind to colour, race, culture, socio-economic status, age, the powerful and the powerless to say the least. 

No one person is excluded.

The latest term being brandished around is the “New Normal”. What does this rather loose term really mean?  Is it just defined by the phrases we’ve heard and seen over the last year and a bit?

Wear a mask

Wash your hands

Keep your distance

Stay at home

Work from home

Lockdown

If we look deeper, we can see that it has changed the way businesses, schools, and institutions of higher learning have been flexible and agile in transforming their business and work models. All thanks to tech-savvy innovators like Zoom, Cisco Webex Meetings, Google Hangouts Meet and other such platforms that offer online solutions.

Delve a little deeper and we can see a shift in the retail scene as well. Some high street brands have become lean and others have closed shop and gone online. And I am sure I have missed quite a few other important transformations. But what we can see is either we survive and thrive in this situation or DIE. 

The crown or the wreath?

This Aunty would like to look at the situation from a different perspective. Have we missed an important point in all this? Is this pandemic also about us as human beings realising that it’s time we changed our ways and mind-sets? This little spec of a virus that’s invisible to the human eye has shown us that its droplets can destroy everything we’ve painstakingly built in our world with just a sneeze or a cough! 

Is it attempting to tell us that we are all not that different from each other? That borders mean “Jack-All”. That privilege or lack of it is man-made. That social distancing is really about respecting the space of others. That wearing a mask may also be about not engaging in idle talk. That staying at home is about STOPPING the frenzied running around and taking stock of our lives.

I wonder if this is the crowning of us as a human race? 

And if we don’t learn the real lessons from this pandemic I guess existence or life as we call it will keep throwing us different challenges until we learn. The question is will we? 

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Fully Vaccinated Freedom 0 1020

Despite the highest number of cases our country has ever seen and major political unrest from all sides, fully vaccinated people are set to be given new rules and SOPs to allow for greater freedom. 

This has been received by the public both positively and negatively. Having some freedom in place for those who are fully dosed will bring much-needed relief to this nearly four-month-long tight lockdown. It’ll also serve as a huge incentive to those who were still unsure about taking the vaccines – the pressure of seeing their peers and friends out and about, enjoying their lives will likely push those on the fence to finally getting cucuk-ed.

However, there is a very real problem: the number of cases and the number of hospital beds available. The main reason we even went into lockdown in May was to alleviate the hospital load, but that has backfired with the hospitals on the verge of collapse. Will allowing more people freedom to go out result in a further increase in cases when we’re already in such a bad position? The Health Ministry also spoke out saying to not rush the relaxation in rules,

It’s going to be an experiment on the efficacy of the vaccines and their ability to keep individuals out of the hospital even if they were to be infected. Apart from this, a major concern is that people are so desperate to return to their lives that they will rush into this new freedom without waiting the two weeks for the immunity to kick in post-second dose. 

This two-week wait is when your immune system is at its most vulnerable and your ability to contract the virus and have it heavily affect you is very much there. If there are no rules set in place to ensure that individuals do wait out this time, there is likely going to be a spike in case of vaccinated people getting covid and falling very sick which will perpetuate a narrative that vaccines don’t work. 

All we can hope for is that the protocol that is set in place will provide clear rules on waiting for your immunity to kick in before venturing out. We’re all looking for this relief, there is no doubt about that, and hopefully, these relaxed rules will bring about some joy back to the people who have truly been suffering during this time.

Do you think it’s a good idea to relax the rules for the fully vaxxed?

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