by Hayaa Tabba
It has been over a year since the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic and people everywhere are eagerly anticipating the day it ends. However, some people’s dismissal of the virus is a major reason it has persisted for so long. While the virus continues to spread, many improvements have been made since the day the world initially locked down. A majority of the population understands the virus, how to protect themselves from it and how to treat themselves if they were to get it. Because of this, the number of people contracting the virus and dying as a result has severely dropped due to a better understanding of how to fight it. Doctors and scientists have also started producing and distributing vaccines for the virus. But will the pandemic become a global crisis again because of the population’s misinterpretation of the vaccine as a cure?
Over the last three months, 345 million COVID vaccines have been administered around the world in numerous countries. Yet some who have gotten the vaccine are confused about how they still can test positive, despite being vaccinated. This is because the vaccines are not an outright cure, but rather lower the chances of a person being able to contract it. If people are still eager to jump back into their pre-pandemic lives, they will still have to respect the SOPs put out by their respective governments as that is the only way to permanently subdue the virus, or at least contain it. If this is followed, the vaccine will act as a tool to speed up the process of controlling the spread of the disease and allow individuals to live more flexibly around others without being a major threat to anyone’s health.
The release of several vaccines has brought hope to people around the world. It has led to a drop in the graph of death and destruction caused by COVID-19. Yet, like all the drops in cases we have faced in the past year, this drop also does not mean that anything is resolved. Whenever a country’s cases start to go down, life quickly resumes as it did before, which only leads to cases rising again, possibly even higher than the initial peak.
Of course, it is not required for people to continuously lock themselves in their homes and isolate themselves from the world indefinitely. However, when cases start to decrease, the best way to keep them from rising again is to keep following the SOPs until there are little to no cases up to the point where it isn’t a threat anymore. Countries like New Zealand have managed to follow this procedure and are now one of the few countries where life is “normal” again.
Similarly, the vaccine will allow people to go out more comfortably and meet smaller groups normally. But the second SOPs are discarded because of the belief that we are now protected through the vaccine and big gatherings restart without people wearing masks or social distancing, then despite the vaccine, the cases will begin to rise again.
I believe that if one does get the vaccine, one can travel or go out, but always with precautions. The second people start acting irresponsibly, attending big events where SOPs are not followed, it will only help push the world further away from the normality everyone longs for. When things start to go in the right direction and the numbers start going down, why stop doing those actions that are working until it’s completely better? We should keep helping our world until the cases are completely gone and we can go back to the life we crave.
Joint Narrative 