2020 has been one hell of a year, hasn’t it? Of course, the biggest thing that has happened in 2020 is the outbreak of Covid-19. Covid-19 has affected everyone in America, as well as those in other countries. We all have had to make changes to our own lives because of Covid-19. Regardless of whether you feel they are necessary or not, we all have had to cope with wearing masks, social distancing, and a whole host of things to worry about.

Let’s start with the masks. Whether you want them or not, we all have to wear them. If you’re going out to ANY public space, then you’ve got to wear a mask. Personally, when it comes to just wearing a mask during my day-to-day life, it’s not so bad. It’s a bit harder to breathe and my glasses fog up and I have mask-breath and people can’t see half of my handsome face. Now, of course, none of that is too desirable, but it’s also not very hard to just cope with it either. But if you’re doing any kind of physical task or activity, such as working a physically demanding job or playing sports, then wearing a mask is entirely different. First of all, you can barely breathe. Where before it was just difficult to breathe, under intense conditions, where you could barely breathe enough without a mask, it’s next to impossible to breathe enough with one on. Plus, if you start sweating, then good luck, because the sweat makes the mask even harder to breathe through, so it feels like you're being suffocated. Not only that, if you wear glasses because you’re breathing so much to compensate for the mask, your glasses are now completely fogged up at all times. This gives you the interesting choice: You can’t see (because your glasses are fogged) or you can’t see (because if you take them off you’re blind). 

The next thing that we’ve all had to deal with is social distancing. It’s a fairly simple concept, the human body can project spit and therefore germs and diseases such as Covid-19 at a distance of up to 6 feet. Therefore in order to try and prevent the spread of Covid-19 everyone is to maintain 6 feet of distance between each other in order to minimize the chances of spreading the disease. This makes sense when you think about it, and it’s a good way to prevent the spread of diseases in general. But in practice, it doesn’t work the way it’s intended. Keeping 6 feet of distance between ourselves and others at all times is a very unfamiliar concept, and because of that, we often don’t follow it whenever we aren’t actively thinking about it. Plus, in many places, it is very hard to follow social distancing protocol due to a lack of space.

This brings us on to another thing we’ve all had to deal with since Covid-19 began, face-to-face interaction. Due to wanting to stop the spread of Covid-19 the American government has closed down a large number of businesses and services. This has been what I think has affected the most people. People are out of work, and/or losing their livelihoods because of the shutdowns. The economy crashed because when businesses aren’t operating, they can’t make money. But the way this has affected me personally, is because of how it has affected schooling. I am a 17 year old high school senior. I didn’t get to take the SAT because of Covid-19, my friends who were in the grade above me didn’t get a proper high-school graduation ceremony because of Covid-19, I can’t see my friends and interact with other people on a daily basis because of Covid-19. The list goes on and on. The thing that frustrates me the most about this whole pandemic is that my life is so greatly affected by the choices and decisions of people who I don’t know and have never even met. I mean, how fair is it that other people get to decide how I have to live my life, with no consent from me whatsoever? For example, I like going to school in person. But now, I can only go two days a week and am behind the normal curriculum because the higher-ups said so. In short, myself and just about every other student are getting screwed over by the decisions of other people on how we have to live our lives.

Overall, I think we can all agree that Covid-19 sucks. But honestly, I don’t think that it’s going to go away anytime soon. So, rather than taking the extreme measures of locking down and never going anywhere, I think that we should still take precautions to prevent the spread of Covid-19, such as wearing masks and social distancing. But we should also try to return to how our lives were before the pandemic. I think that this is a fairly simple and reasonable compromise that tries to achieve the best of both worlds.