One Senior’s View on Covid-19

Throughout your education, history is a required course and in that course, you learn about different epidemics and their impacts. As a senior, I never thought I would be living through a pandemic, or first-hand experiencing the effects of a pandemic. You never really understand these things until they happen to you, and you always hear that we are going to be the future. We learned about the economic responses of previous pandemics, but we could only imagine the experience the people in history went through. Sure, there have been other diseases that have affected other nations, but nothing had traveled so rapidly the same way as Coronavirus. Now, we are literally living in history textbook content for future generations. Novel Coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, broke out in December 2019, in Wuhan China. The virus was obviously very serious, but it quickly became a large issue when the virus swept across China, Italy, and places that felt far away, until it wasn’t far away anymore. It felt like the virus came to the USA in a blink of the eye; it swept through nations so quickly. When Novel Coronavirus hit Connecticut, there was so much uncertainty surrounding us; everyone was wondering what the next step was going to be. The first step that effected almost every class of 2020 senior in Connecticut, athletes or not, was the CIAC winter sports tournaments being canceled. For the athletes, this was especially devastating, because they did not know when their last time stepping on the court, ice or track would be with their teammates, until the decision was made for them. For the student spectators, we knew that now we would never get to dress up according to a theme that the entire student section would follow, we would not be chanting cheers in the front row of the hockey rink bleachers, and we would not all be united on a Friday night or Saturday afternoon to watch our peers compete in their sports. While everyone knows and understands that this was for everyone’s individual safety, it was still devastating to come to terms with the fact that we would be missing out on such a key role of “the high school experience”. The next big impact the seniors were faced with was the transition to online classes. The last few months of high school are supposed to be the best months – to wear our senior sweatshirts, our crew socks, sit in our classes and at our lunch tables with our teachers and friends that we have known for the past 4 years. While we are lucky enough to have the technology to always be in touch with our teachers and friends, the experience isn’t the same. The memories that are supposed to be made during this time were quickly switched to virtual memories and things that are going to be written about in textbooks. As a class, I think we have all felt heartbreak and so much uncertainty these past few weeks, but as SHA has taught us, we will all get through this together.