Living in a Void: How the Coronavirus Pandemic affected our Lives

By Ibrahim Olawale

This book outlines how the pandemic and the lockdown affected our lives, bringing us face to face with our basic selves. As a result of the lockdown, life took on new meaning.

While the focus of this book is centered on how the pandemic and

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Roaring Lion Newcastle LTD
• Release date: Sep 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913636876

Ibrahim Olawale

Ibrahim is a poet and creative writer. He is a graduate of International Business Management and works as a Cyber Security consultant. He hails from Lagos, Nigeria and believes in the power of words and its effects. When not writing, you can find him watching football and listening to music.

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Acknowledgements

With love in my heart, I am grateful to everyone who has contributed immensely to the success of this book. The world is a safer place thanks to people who have dedicated their lives to uphold the human race despite our continuous challenges.

To my ever-supportive mum, my powerful role model who taught me love and kindness; and to my friends and family (without their support and experience, this book would be non-existent), thank you.

Chapter One

The Outbreak

The outbreak of COVID-19 has created an unprecedented situation around the world.

- Ram Nath Kovind

T

he year 2020 began with harrowing news for everyone. The world was on fire—literally. A new virus appeared on the block, the coronavirus (COVID-19). The world shut down, countries went on lockdown, cities and towns were placed on quarantine, health facilities became overwhelmed, and economic and social activities took back stage in the face of survival.

Countries closed their borders against travel, people were forced to stay in their houses for months, and stringent measures, including the regular washing of hands, social distancing, the use of face masks, use of alcohol-based sanitizers, and other safety measures, were advocated by governments and those responsible for responding to and battling against the virus.

The whole world was brought to its knees.

Human emotions around this time were marked with fear, uncertainty, and tension, as millions of people were turning up sick all over the world and thousands were dying. Humanity faced its greatest challenge in a long time—one not limited to a certain region, race, or location—and it seemed like the end of the world was in sight with the advent of the coronavirus and its global influence, compared to previous deadly pandemics like the bubonic plague and influenza (which ravaged only Europe) or Ebola (which emerged only in a few regions and took tens of millions of lives).

The coronavirus was first discovered at a seafood and animal market in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, when what seemed like an outbreak of pneumonia broke out amongst its populace without an obvious underlying cause. Before the city of Wuhan was put on lockdown, several people had moved out of the city to other destinations, unknowingly spreading the virus in what became the fastest and widest spread of a virus in the history of humankind, due to its far-reaching global impact.

The whole world paused for days, weeks, and then months as both governments and health experts alike tried to identify the virus amidst the growing number of cases, how it worked, how it could be contracted, if the virus could be contained, and its probable impact on the economy and the lives of their citizens.

Amidst the rise of the virus, there were growing opinions that this was an act of the Chinese government to cripple the world economy in their favour—a malicious attempt to wrest world power from the United States of America and other power blocs. This seemed especially so with the way China effectively set up state of the art health facilities in less than a week of the pandemic to mitigate the virus; the fact that, at the time, the whole world was suffering from the impact of the virus; that it never went beyond two cities in China; the controversy surrounding the lab in which the virus was said to have broken out in Wuhan; and the subsequent deaths of those lab workers who had allegedly expressed concerns before the outbreak.

The then-United States President Donald Trump sparked and continued to fan the flames of this conspiracy theory as he kept emphasizing that the virus was the Chinese Virus, saying It came from China, hence it is the Chinese virus. That statement alone, repeated often by President Donald Trump, and the fact that China was not forthcoming in divulging the circumstances concerning the outbreak said a lot, at the time.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is caused by a novel strain of coronavirus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). It is part of a group of viruses that can cause respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases in humans. Scientist and health experts believe that the new strain of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) likely originated in bats or pangolins as another variation of the vast family of coronaviruses present in animals like camels, bats, raccoon, dogs, cats, and others; seven of which are known to cause disease in humans.

Starting from the period the virus was first discovered in December 2019 to the time the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in March 2020, there were already confirmed cases of 509,164 infected people and 23,335 deaths globally (according to the World Health Organization's statistics), and the numbers which were steadily rising by the day would later run into millions for both categories.

Symptoms of COVID-19 included fever, dry cough, difficulty breathing, tiredness, aches and pains, sore throat, diarrhea, conjunctivitis, headache, loss of taste or smell, a rash on the skin, or discoloration of the fingers or toes. More than half of all cases of COVID-19 remained asymptomatic, making it hard to determine who really had the virus, without proper testing.

The virus is transferable through contact with respiratory droplets carrying infectious virus, which is then transferred to another person through the eyes, nose, or mouth. Coughing, sneezing, talking, and touching are the means of transmission, and it can be transferred through airborne transmission of droplets for around six feet—hence the need for social distancing. Further testing also led to the discovery that droplets could linger on hard surfaces for up to 72 hours, and that touching a surface where infected droplets lingered and then touching the mouth, nose, or eyes could also transfer the virus.

Several groups of people were found to be more at risk of having severe cases of COVID-19 (mostly older people with underlying health issues), and around