The Year 2020 has not been what most of us were hoping it would be

A year that caught us by surprise !

On the 31st of December which is known to be a new year eve we were all looking forward to the new year ahead of us the year 2020. In expaxtion we had a year filled with prosperity, fulfilment and achieving goals.Everything looked promising until we were attacked by the New Novel Corona Virus also known as Covid-19. This is a virus from Wuhan in China it affects mainly the respiratory system.

Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that this pandemic would get to South Africa! We all saw what happened in China it was a tragedy people were dying in large numbers everyday and we never thought that this would happen to us. During the month of  March 2020 South Africa reported it's first case of Covid-19, something we didn't see coming. It started increasing with with very small numbers during that month and I was somehow relaxed that it wouldn't hit us that hard! Only a few weeks later the number of infected people across the country were starting to increase rapidly.

On the 26th of March 2020 declared a nationwide shutdown to curb the spread of the virus.This was meant to last for a 21day period which gave us hope that our lives will soon go back to normal. As time went on an extension of another 21 days had to be made. At this point the number of confirmed cases were starting to increase at an alarming rate! A lot of people lost their jobs and some were retrenched, small business were strained since they were not making any sort of profit. A number of families were left poverty stricken due to the strict lockdown measures that were put in place by our government. This shattered a lot of people's plans and dreams because almost everything had to to be put on hold so for a moment our lives were on stand still. Some of the sectors were not allowed to operate, leaving a negative impact on the on the financial well-being of our economy.

The national lockdown was then categorised into different levels, level 5,4,3,2 and 1. As from the month of April we moved from alert level 5 to level 4, when the levels go down it simply means some of the restrictions are being eased. In June we then moved to level 3,this was when we also experienced a significant rise in the number of deaths due to the fact we were in the middle of winter and the virus is known to have more strength when it's cold. We also had to adjust to the new norm of always wearing a mask when going leaving the house,the regular washing of hands and sanitizing.

It really has been a rough year. We are now in the month of August, we are curently on level 2 of the lockdown which means things are slowly looking up for us. What we need to bear in mind is that the pandemic is not yet over until a vaccine is found so until then let's continue to keep ourselves safe.