My Covid Journey

I became aware of Covid 19 in December 2019, as reports started emerging out of China as well as other countries in the region of a new SARS type illness that was doing the rounds. Initially, it was obscure in nature and not many details were being released as to where it came from, or how virulent it was. Remembering the original SARS outbreak in Hong Kong a few years ago, I believed that it would be contained within the area and run its course. Never could I have imagined the extent to which it would affect the world we live in.

As it turned out, the virus spread across the globe quite quickly, affecting Europe profoundly. Italy, in particular, was hardest hit and it was then no surprise that on the morning of Thursday, 5 March 2020, we in South Africa recorded our first case of the disease through a couple who have travelled to Italy and had returned to their home in KwaZulu-Natal. We, as a country, were put under level 5 lockdown on 26 March and, the rest as they say, is history. A three-week lockdown turned into a two-year rollercoaster of back-and-forth levels, at least three different waves and variants, and Draconian rules put into place by a government wanting to remind us, its citizens, that they had absolute power over our lives.

So, let me be clear. Covid 19 was, and is, a real disease that affected real people, some of whom died because of it. It was a tragedy. The worldwide pandemic was the first of its kind since the Spanish flu of 1918, but to equate it to this was not only highly unjustifiable, but was, I believe, an attempt by world powers such as the WHO, the UN, the WEF, et cetera, to flex their collective muscle and take away humanity's rights by instilling fear in us all. All the while, I was asking myself; how did we get here? Where did this illness come from? The answers I started to find were shocking, but what horrified me most, was the degree to which mainstream media, governments, and the aforementioned worldwide bodies were prepared to go to keep us all in the dark.

During lockdown, we had rules placed over us by the South African "Corona Command Council" that included what some might consider common sense, along with others that one might call absolute insanity. While I could understand things like the banning of alcohol, because of people getting drunk, doing stupid things, and congesting emergency rooms at hospitals, I could not get my head around why one was banned from wearing a tank top, or toeless shoes? What was so dangerous about purchasing a cooked chicken from a grocery store? And, while I am not a smoker, I wondered why cigarettes were suddenly made illegal to purchase, bearing in mind that a