Med-Hive is a community that is filled with a lot of professionals in the medical industry. It can be very intimidating for someone that is not in that line to make a post here, but I'm crossing the barrier to share the experience I had with Covid19.
The good thing about this post is that it will serve as an opportunity for the professional healthcare workers and academias in this Community to have a look at Covid19 through the lens of a normal lad who is just sharing his experience about the pandemic.
We will get to that in a minute, but for the record; I'm genuinely grateful for the fact that ever since the first time I heard about Covid19 up to today, none of my friends, relatives or acquaintance lost his or her life because of Covid19 pandemic.
It was a strange period for the whole world. Time to let you into my experience.
How it all started;
I was scheduled to serve Nigeria under the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) from 10th March 2020 to a year later. In response to the Clarion call of the country, I left home on a 21 hours journey from the South Eastern part of Nigeria to the northern part of the country.
We usually have a pattern that involves getting 3 weeks of training in an enclosed camp,
...but immediately after spending 6 days in the Camp, news of 'a disease that kills people within the twinkle of an eye' started to circulate in the camp. A camp filled with 2300 Corp members and an approximate of 100 soldiers, 150 NYSC staff and 50 petty business owners.
We woke up on the 7th day around 4:30 am to a nationwide instruction that marked the end of Camping for all of us across all the 36 States in Nigeria.
In all honesty, that day was the happiest day of my stay at that Camp. Not just me. Everyone was jubilating. You may think the excitement was because we wanted to be in a safer place, but that was not the case. At least, not for me. I didn't care about 'the disease'. I was just excited that I can now leave the training and explore the new City where I will be serving the country for 12 months.
If anyone told me that I will be spending 7 straight months in lockdown because of a certain 'Covid19', I would have cussed at the person.
But, it happened!
It really happened!
Covid19 came with travel restrictions, businesses were shut down, and movements were restricted. Nothing was going on anywhere. It was like someone pressed a pause button. I was stuck in another part of Nigeria where I knew only my Cousin who was based in that part of the country. I don't know anything about the native language they speak there. I also knew nothing about their native delicacies.
It was insane! But, that was just the beginning.
During the lockdown
You know how the lockdown started. We heard that China are in lockdown. We also heard that America are in lockdown. More countries adopted this measure until we started hearing snippets of a lockdown in Nigeria.
We started with a week lockdown. One week led to two weeks and then a month until it almost became a normal lifestyle.
I can still recall checking the stats every freaking day to see the number of infected, fatality rate and recovery rate. It was too huge a record to be taken for granted, but when you are forced into a lockdown in a country like Nigeria, you will soon realize that there is something more dreadful than Covid19.
People in more decent parts of the world were getting Covid19 relief funds. Some countries ran food bank initiatives and sent food items to people from door to door.
I watched a bunch of those things from the screen of a TV and it felt like a little circus show.
Over here, we heard so much about palliative, but I didn't see even a cup of rice in form of palliative from the government. I didn't care about those, but I'm pretty sure that millions of Nigerians needed it so much. But, our damned government are damned to the marrows.
When the citizens are forced to stay at home without getting any money, many people said that 'enough is enough'. We also saw slogans like 'better to die of Covid than Povid'... Povid is coined out of Poverty.
When the movement started growing due to the level of suffering people were facing, many started to defy the sit-at-home order. Some called Covid19 a scam while others saw it as a sham. To crown it all, I started hearing statements like 'Covid only kills white people. Haha.
You know, fear of the unknown can feel unreal sometimes. We didn't know much about Covid19. As I said earlier, I still don't know anyone that died of it. This isn't to say that I doubt the existence of a Covid19. But, what we all know is Poverty. We know hunger and we know from experience that it's not something you want to experience.
With all these variables in mind, more resistance kicked off. In reply to this action, our men in uniform (you know what I'm saying) were sent all over the country to enforce the lockdown. Some of these folks are trigger-happy and they didn't waste time to open fire on some people just because they broke the lockdown protocol.
Long story short... The whole Covid19 experience caused a lot of issues in Nigeria and I experienced all of these with my Koro Koro eyes.
After the long lockdown
Nigeria without a solid economic framework went on a lockdown because of Covid19. By the time the lockdown was over, what started as a health issue erupted into massive chaos which affected the economy...,
...our educational system, security of lives and so on.
I can't place a figure on the number of people that lost their means of livelihood due to this. Many people were laid off and had to restart life in the labour market. Landlords in particular had to store their conscience in an external hard drive whenever they are meeting a tenant to pay rent. We saw a high level of man's inhumanity to man.
Why?
I hope that's the question on your mind.
Lemme explain. When the lockdown was over, many people had so much debt to pay. People wanted to rebuild their finance and sadly, you can't do any of that while being considerate... Or so it seems. I can still recall the story of people that got laid off through a phone call. Not one and not two.
Many people had to face the worst side of life after the lockdown.
For the record, it's important for anyone reading this to note that the end of the lockdown was not the end of Covid19.
We all had to embrace a new lifestyle afterwards. If you are curious to know about the couple of changes we had to face and my Covid19 vaccination experience, feel free to look forward to the second part of this post.
You don't want to miss it. Hehe.
This whole story was not a fun one to share. I had very weird experience during Covid19 and I saw what the rest of the world passed through. Nonetheless, I'm glad that I'm alive on a day like this to share this.
Special regards to @med-hive team and their Community for bringing up this topic for discussion. You can checkout the Prompt Announcement post for more details.
Everything I said here is based on my experience. Look forward to the second part.
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