Craig Butcher

A year of lockdown

Looking back at the turn of the new year into 2020, it was going to be the year that the United Kingdom leaving the EU because of the Brexit vote. There were rumours about a virus that was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019.

It was a small blip on the scale until the scale of the pandemic starts to build very slowly over the weeks with new cases prompting the world news to look and understand what is happening.

Wind onto March 2020 that the full scale of the virus was running rampant throughout the world. It was joked that "God was playing Plague. Inc" and before we knew it.

The lockdown happened.

23rd March 2020 became the date in human history that the entire world must do something to prevent the spread. Numerous messages of washing your hands, social distance, shop what you need, don't buy too many toilet papers, be kind to people, shield yourself if you have underlying health issues, do we need to go on?

One by one, everyone was forced to work from home, the schools winds down only to allow key workers (NHS, supermarkets, essentials staff) to send their children to school. Home schooling was barely formed,
we all became the full time parents, the educators, the gatekeepers to the world outside of our household.

The world grinds to a halt, we have became The caves of steel (where humanity in the future lives underground). Photographs from around the world showing the dramatic changes everywhere, social media went into a frenzy what is happening in their life. Humanity was fully in the spotlight for generations with recorded histories everywhere. A true treasure trove of archives.

Let's stop and think here for a second.

What did we learn about humanity in 2020? Everything was under scrutiny of the sheer belief of what human beings can truly be. We read stories of doctors and nurses working hours to help the infected live again, we read in horror what human beings can do to each other in sake of madness, fear, and panic.

The world became odd to the point where it felt like the people in charge above us were doing everything they can to what they thought was the right thing to do.

Wind on a year and the world's death from COVID-19 stands at 2.73 million people.

Let's take a moment today and understand that we cannot let ourselves to be in this position again.

We need to be better than this, we need people around the world to stop squabbling over vaccines, and...

There is no normal anymore.

The future of humanity has changed.

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