The COVID-19 pandemic By: oswaldo ramos

The year was 2019, everyone was getting ready to move on to a new decade and start it right. Gyms were getting filled, families were gathering to celebrate, and I was joking around with my friends saying that 2020 couldn’t possibly be worse than 2019… I was wrong. It all started late 2019 when it reported that China was having an abnormal number of pneumonia cases. I personally looked past it saying stuff like “ it's most likely just the air from the factories that's affecting them, it can’t be something serious.”. Then after only a couple days it was given a name novel coronavirus. Around this time I hadn’t heard much of the virus since australia was still on fire and that's all the news talked about. Then in late january we all heard of it, coronavirus was spreading fast, way faster than anyone had expected. I was in complete shock, “how...HOW! It was only like two weeks how it already spread so much” After that it hit Italy and that's when the world began to panic. Italy, a place so far away from China, had a huge outbreak of what is now called the COVID-19 virus.

To think all this in the span of two months, I couldn't believe “how did it get this bad” I told myself “ how could it be spreading so quickly”. Later on I did some research as it turned out that the coronavirus was a brand new strain of a previous virus that had never been seen in a human before. As viruses have DNA or RNA that can be changed and make the virus different or stronger in some cases.

For me april 24 was when I realized that nothing was going to change, it's only going to get worse. The covid-19 virus showed no signs of stopping and it killed more than a million

people. The way we had to live was different. We had to keep our social distance because COVID-19 was built in a way that helps it stick on to peoples skin which then goes into the body attacking all that it can. What currently scares me the most is that if it gets to the ocean what are we going to do then. Water has 2 hydrogen molecules which gives it this stickiness to it.

Combine that with covid-19 and goodbye to whatever is in the ocean.

It's been years since that pandemic hit and we all thought we were safe. Then something happened, something that should not have happened. It turns out that everyone with the virus still had but it was dormant, deep in the victim's cells. But eventually it replicated at such a speed that it would overload all the cells exploding them and making the victim vulnerable, similar to HIV that weakens the body by getting rid of white blood cells which fight disease. Being in such a vulnerable state it led to people dying to the weakest and strongest diseases that exist. Now I and many others stay at home not knowing who still has the virus and who's next to die, but what I do know is that this virus will never leave.