One year ago, on Nov. 17, 2019, the first case of COVID-19 was reported back in China. Quickly spreading, this single cased caused an outbreak in China, which led to the first action of lockdown to take place over seas. The virus effortlessly made its way to other counties, infecting thousands. On Jan. 20, 2020, the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was reported. It was not long after this that everyone’s lives began to change. 

Masks started to become mandatory. It was almost out of the normal to go out in public without something covering a person’s face. Restaurants shut down, workplaces closed, and schools began to function online. By the summer, our country began to reopen. We could now sit in restaurants, gather in small groups, and it seemed as if COVID-19 was slowly beginning to finally get better.

By the time fall came around, colleges had gone back and larger groups of people were starting to hangout again. When Halloween made its appearance, parties were thrown, and it became evident that a second wave was about to hit, and hit hard. Now, a year later from the first reported case of the now national pandemic, cases are once again on the rise. 

New precautions are once again being put into place in different states to help prevent the spread of the virus for a second time. However, the cat was let out of the bag in the summer by opening everything up and allowing people to hangout in larger groups, so putting it back in may be even harder than it was the first time we all got stuck in quarantine. 

Senior Bre Fay is one of the many students who feels that returning to a lockdown again is something we just cannot do. 

“We’ve already been open for so long that no one is going to want to return to how things used to be back in the spring,” Fay said “I committed to college through my volleyball, and if I have to stop playing because of a second quarantine, it could cause issues for me in my future college career.”

Fay is not the only one who feels that a second lockdown may be too far gone at this point. Senior Brennan Wood also agrees with Fay’s statements, but has an alternate approach to it as well. 

“I definitely feel like a second lockdown is going to be very hard considering what is currently going on in the world right now,” Wood said. “However, I feel like it may be necessary to have more restrictions until the vaccine comes out. This way, cases will stop spreading.” 

With a vaccine still months away and cases on the rise, it looks as if the near future might be a quarantined one. Hopefully, with a vaccine that currently has over a 90% success rate and is waiting to be released to the public, we will not have to deal with COVID-19 for too much longer into 2021. One year ago, people had no idea that their lives were about to change not only for the country, but for the whole world.