Pandemic Diary #1

I remember in the month of February 2020, when I visited the United States for some internal conference WHO declared the COVID-19 a “pandemic”. A lot of people were very scared to travel and canceled. Because I was a bit early into that conference for some internal meetings, I was already in the US. I was receiving emails coming into a group for all the attendees who were part of, asking about if anyone is traveling, what kind of precautions need to be taken. Frankly, I did not really realize that it was so critical that time and no one, in fact, no one did. It was announced by the conference organizer that we are absolutely fine with having the conference being delivered for the whole week Monday to Friday. Imagine that, you are in our country and in the world is fighting and then there are deaths happening across it all started here. At the very beginning and WHO declared pandemic and nobody knew what pandemic really is. We heard the word epidemic but never heard of the term pandemic in our lifetime. So there was a situation when people were all normal I haven’t seen anybody wearing the mask in that conference nor have seen the temperature measurement is happening. Social distancing was not in practice. It happened this like as it happened earlier. So in a typical conference together inside a room with hundreds of people. Sometimes if you have a speaker who is very popular a lot of people gather in a queue outside of the room. All these things if I think now it is very scary to me.

What was scarier back then was I traveled through an international airport in packet travel through all the international airports. In my whole transit, no one really was checking the temperature. When I landed in India it was written that if the Travelers are visiting from certain countries then only a special screening is required otherwise not. In fact, it was not a very serious business. I said it before that nobody understood the word pandemic. I landed in India around the 11th of February, life was pretty normal back then. I even attended a few visitors flying from Europe to India attending customer meanings. “COVID” — yes it was a term but to be ignored.

Also, the term COVID-19 created some confusion around why it is 19 and why not 20 because it was the year 2020. The reason stated by WHO was because this was first observed in China back in late 2020 hence the name of given as COVID-19.