By TYLER HOGAN
Sheridan High School Student
The Sheridan Student Column is brought to readers by Sheridan High School’s 10th grade English class, taught by Abby Williams.
May has come and gone, and now school is out for summer. But what will COVID mean for school two years later? We all remember how summer was two years ago: locked indoors and uncertain if we would ever escape our house. Will summer 2022 be anything like this?
State restrictions were pretty rough when COVID first hit, and rightfully so. According to statista.com, on March 1, 2020, the United States had 61 total cases of COVID-19. By the end of that month there were 188,000 cases. At that point, we didn’t have common practices to combat cases. People were still touching their faces and masks were not used. By June, when most states had already entered statewide lockdown, according to statista.com, there were over 400,000 cases in that month alone. Airlines were closed, and beaches were shut down.
By 2021, children were back in school, and life was seemingly on track to return to normal, or as close as we could be in the aftermath of a deadly pandemic. But, cases were growing at a steeper rate. Quarantines felt normal to me, when only a year earlier it was our country’s biggest fear. In June 2021, cases had slowed down, with only 600,000 compared to the 2.5 million four months earlier (statista.com). Florida beaches were open other than red tide in 2021. On June 15, 2021 Disney World in Florida opened to the out-of-state public. On April 15, 2021, Universal Studios opened to the public. By summer 2021, most dining rooms in restaurants and fast food establishments had reopened.
Now, with access to the vaccine, and knowledge to combat the virus, as of May 2022, 66 percent of residents in the United States are vaccinated. Now we are at a few hundred thousand cases per month as of May 11, 2022 (statista.com) and the world is used to COVID. This disease is no longer a new thing, and it has become normal to hear someone close to you has COVID. In the present there are only light restrictions, like masks on airlines.
Your summer will be safe. The spread of COVID has slowed, but your precautions shouldn’t, so wear your mask and wash your hands.