The exponential rise in COVID-19 Cases

Just one week after hitting 10 million COVID-19 cases, the U.S. has hit 11 million. There’s no doubt that cases are surging, and as people are getting more restless, they’re getting more reckless.

While COVID-19 originated in late 2019, most in the U.S. would recognize March 13 as the start of the downward spiral that has been 2020. For a lot of students and educators, it was the last day of a semi normal life before corona really hit. 

As schools shut down, so did businesses both big and small.This threw everyone into a life they were not used to, and we’ve lived with this life for the past eight months. People are getting tired of all of it, and it makes sense. We can’t expect people to accept this as the new normal; especially when the old normal lasted years. However, if people miss the old normal so much, we have to stop pretending that nothing ever happened. 

After about mid September, cases have been going up exponentially. People are hanging out in large groups, they’re not wearing masks, and they’re going to and hosting parties. They’re doing the very opposite of what we need to be doing. That’s why cases have been rising these past few months. People are tired of the strain this pandemic has put on their lives, so they’re being reckless everything as close to normal as possible. 

The more we cover ourselves with this veil of normality, the more harm it’s going to cause us. You can’t run or hide from problems as big as a pandemic. That’s why it’s important to continue the same practices we had at the start of all this. We need to keep wearing masks, we need to keep social distancing, and we need to stop acting like everything is normal. It’s hard, it sucks, but if we as a country can do this, we can decrease cases exponentially,  instead of raising them.