Cole Barger, essay winner

     In early March while we were still attending school before the shutdown, there was talk of a quickly spreading virus they were calling the corona virus/COVID-19, there was more and more talk about it every day it seemed, But among my generation it felt just to be a joke, we started hearing about how fast this thing was spreading but never felt like this was actually gong to be a problem. Well, little did my friends and I know that in just a matter of time the whole world would be under quarantine with a global pandemic in our hands.

     It all started with the news talk, and with the news social media does not fall short behind. As soon as you heard it there were memes and people talking about it left right and center, yet nobody seemed to take it seriously up until schools started closing for the month and eventually for the rest of the year. In only about two weeks the virus was already local in Washington, the first place in America where someone tested positive. This was only the beginning, we all watched as our governors announced what the plan may look like for the next 12 to 18 months, things were taken up a notch from there. Numbers of the sickened soared and the death tole was a factor nobody wanted to think about. The virus spread so quick that we all went from just talking about it to watching our favorite restaurants and businesses eventually shutdown and may have even gone out of business. In me and my friends heads we were thinking, this was a blessing for all the hard work we had put into school and that we should all go party. That was definitely what we did, was stay up all night and hang out with each other.

    About a week into our break, I was heading over to pick up one of my friends to go do rebellious teenage things, when I had totally lost contact with him and we were stuck in traffic behind lots of cop cars and ambulances. We made our way out before getting too stuck and we ended up deciding he was not gonna make it that night. By the morning I was getting hundreds of calls from people asking if my friend was okay, I was discombobulated from just waking up when I finally received a call from a friend’s mom. She was in tears as she went through details about a deadly car accident the friend, I was supposed to meet the night before was in, as a result my friend passed away after battling a coma for months. This was my reality check, it didn’t take too long or too much for life to kick me in the rear without warning that this was gonna be the beginning of a long and harsh set of things that I wont have any control over. Hopefully, I can take these things away from now and learn to be a better person in my own individual way.