The second year of the coronavirus brought us to our knees: How we have been affected after 2 years of deprivation, bans and illness

March 2022 closed 2 years (two in full) that the coronavirus pandemic defined our lives and our daily lives. And we set as a turning point in March 2020 as it was then that the first restrictive measures for the coronavirus (the first lockdown we say) entered into force in Greece. The announcement of the first official case had preceded in February of the same year.

But where are we now that we are talking (2022) and how did this horrible timeline evolve of the last two years amid deprivation, unprecedented bans, illness and death?

About a year after the pandemic started, that is, about a year ago, people began to confidently describe the moment as a “late pandemic.” It is as if this distinction could be applied in any other way than retrospectively. It’s as if you can never know what an era really looks like before you see it in the back of the mirror. Ex post knowledge is 2021.

Take a selfie vaccination in a waiting room of the vaccination center and this is how the longest two weeks of your life begin. It does not matter how fierce the competition for the “longest two weeks of your life” has become lately. Watch viral videos of newly vaccinated influencers surprising their parents in person in previously banned homes, and pray that your parents do not see them.

The first time you dine again in an indoor restaurant, you feel like you are being reborn in a casino. You are fragile like a bird in the sensory overload of the forgotten atmosphere. A waiter appears and you instinctively grab a mask that no one at the table can agree is necessary. You are no longer sure how all this works. Not just germs, but the basics of food in a restaurant – the order in which we order. You are rusty in… to be human.

His pandemic coronavirus it has not only changed who we are, but also how we are with other people. Which should be noted, they have also changed, in a world that is changing day by day.

The first bubble of the family

The seal is broken. The cinemas are habitable again. Maybe the planes too. The masks come out and you get used to them. The capsules collapse. You enter the houses of the friends you have made in the pandemic. They also come to you, terrorizing your pandemic puppy who has not received any outside company. You read articles about the fear of socializing and being re-perceived. It is not logical. The walls between the world and you are finally collapsing, just as the weather is becoming amazing. You think: Let’s go, damn it.

You start making plans with greed, as if your new freedom can be taken away from you at any time. You have no idea that this is exactly what is going to happen.

At the moment, the promise of vaccinated release is shining in every corner of public life. You admire the revival of “public life” itself. Strangers in a state of rage have sex again in public toilets. You first hear the phrase “hot summer with vaccines” just before you hear that local governments may resort to bribes to entice skeptics to get a free vaccine that obviously works.

First the family. Your little nephew is now a small child who is afraid of you. Your nieces in elementary school have not grown as much as you feared. They still laugh at your stupid nonsense without being ashamed. And they themselves are still fools. Your siblings who have children are marked in ways you will not understand. The things that occupied their minds are different from the things that occupied yours. They want to talk about just a few of them.

Your mom can not stop hugging you. The sudden abundance of personal family time merely underscores the pain of his recent, torturous absence. You return to the city where you once lived and reconnect with the life you once had. The last time you saw this place, you had left it. Now you are just a visitor.

“The delta mutagenologists” – The second year of the pandemic was catastrophic

Your broken circle of friends is temporarily reorganized, and everyone is nervous as they perceive each other’s z axis for the first time in over a year. Everyone hangs out without the others. Not everyone exists anymore.

Your girlfriends who got pregnant in the pandemic are now girlfriends who have children in the pandemic. Can you imagine what their lives are like now? Your imagination fails. Nevertheless, you are returning to the old rhythms and maybe to some new ones. You are drunk with your friends and drunk from being with them, gazing at glowing fireworks, the glittering promise of a future that has been restored.

When people start talking about something called Delta mutation, you keep it quiet. Absolutely not. Risk-takers may not always be right, right?

Everything soon falls apart. You hear the phrase “revolutionary infection” for the first time. You can still catch the plague while you are fully vaccinated, simply with a drastically reduced risk of dying. There are people who receive this information and then wonder, sometimes on television, “Why bother getting vaccinated?”

After living in constant panic for so long, you have reached the land of promise, only to discover that the promise was false. You are devastated. The purgatory is not supposed to end with more purgatory. It feels like a defeat to wear a mask again at the grocery store. You feel worse when you realize how many people refuse to do it. “We’re not going to wear that again,” they say, as if talking about low-rise jeans.

All the artists will finally go on tour. But everything will be postponed very quickly. Everyone returns to the office. For a while. Everyone is moving forward with a hybrid design. There is never a good time to plan something. Make plans, the coronavirus in one corner laughs.

The wave of the “Great Resignation”

The pandemic teaches you both what you do not want and what you want. (To finish.) Everyone quits their jobs. Everyone gets a divorce. They say that assessing the state of your marriage during a pandemic is like controlling your heart rate during a marathon. But even if you know why your heart is beating so fast, you may want to know if you are going to have a heart attack or not.

You spend so much time as a couple, confusing your identity. You feel the urgent need to have secrets. You know things about each other that you can not say to each other. You are bothered by the world most of the time, and the person you love most in the world needs to absorb all that irritation by adding it to their own collection. However, you have never been more in love.

You joke that all pandemic couples owe a little break to each other. Your wife laughs and then takes the dog to a hut in the woods for a long, otherwise lonely weekend.

Omicron and the coronavirus that will knock on the door of us all

You are not done with the vaccines, as it turns out. There is another vaccine. The coronavirus is not finished with the vaccines, as it turns out. Another variant is available.

THE new mutation is so contagious that it’s almost funny. “Omicron makes Delta look like the Covid Classic,” you hear in horror. It is so contagious that masks are useless against it. That same weekend, the new Spider-Man movie grossed 253 million tickets. It will be a long winter.

It’s hard to know who to trust anymore. You do not completely trust yourself. Anyone who seems to have navigated the coronavirus pandemic as carefully as you do is starting to get infected. It seems inevitable that you will get it too. Some people who have been through the pandemic complaining about security restrictions now choose to say they are done with the pandemic. Between 3,000 and 4,000 Americans die from Covid every day as they declare this. About 70 in Greece of 10,000,000.

When you finally catch the virus, the condition comes almost as a relief. This thing that you avoided as the worst thing that has ever happened to you (for some it was, let’s not lie) for two years finally caught you. It is unbelievable that your partner is unaffected. You live in quarantine away from them.

All the while, you worked together to protect each other from the danger that lay ahead. Now, you are the danger that awaits.

Fatigue is the worst part of this Golgotha, like an elevated giant pushing you, gently but persistently, every time you try to do anything. It is surreal to feel as physically tired, for once, as you are mentally and spiritually. You lie in bed and let the days go by without participating in them, as if traveling through time. The quarantine works and your man remains free from covid. Until it sticks a few weeks later.

The initial dream of the “late pandemic” just managed to dawn in 2021 before fading. Now he is back. We are relaxing the limitations of COVID, despite what has happened every other time we have done it in the past.

You do not know what else you can do, and you have no reason, anyway. Let’s start the next experiment. What’s the worst that could happen: More purgatory? You used to have more firm views on who needs more protection and how this could be achieved. You want to do the right thing, but you have no idea what that is.