Annus Horribilis

2020, an unprecedented year in several ways, introduced such new and unfamiliar terms as 'Quarantine' and 'Lockdown,' thanks to the novel coronavirus pandemic. Also referred to as Covid-19, the coronavirus disease spread from animals to humans and was first reported in Wuhan city in China in December 2019 and then it soon became a global pandemic, despite a myriad of travelling restrictions and severe lockdown measures imposed across the world.

When the lethal virus was first detected in China, a lackadaisical attitude shown by the Chinese government in the beginning helped the coronavirus spread around the world and up to now it has killed more people in the United States and France than those of China. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the virus a global emergency earlier in 2020. According to the WHO report, some 86.2 million people have been detected with coronavirus, nearly 46.7 million have recovered and about 1.8 million succumbed to death.

The former U.S. President Donald Trump called it a 'Chinese Virus' and 'Kung Fu Virus,' which was quite a condescending and disparaging statement coming from the White House. The pandemic is rightly termed as a global threat and the world's most advanced nations are making their best effort to develop Covid-19 vaccine with high efficacy rates. Doing this, capitalist regimes are striving hard to make the most of the pandemic merely to fill in their own coffers, while the most affluent nations might use the vaccination move as a political tool to pressurise and dictate their own terms to socio-economically vulnerable nations.

In the devastating year of 2020, the fire in Australia's forests prolonged for a long time, reducing over 35,000 homes to ashes as well as destroying about 46 million acres of land, an area roughly the size of a country like Syria. In addition to that, the year 2020 witnessed a new wave of racial unrest in the United States when George Floyd, a black American national, was brutally killed over a petty crime by a white cop, a tragic event that was overtly an act of racism perpetrated by white supremacists. Erupted in most parts of the U.S., the ensuing 'Black Lives Matter' protests participated by around 20 million people comprising both blacks and whites, who rallied against the racial injustice and violence and discrimination against Black people in the presidential era of Donald Trump in particular.

The same year in August, a massive explosion in Beirut in Lebanon resulted in numerous casualties, countless injuries, and a great number of internally displaced people, not to exclude a huge loss incurred to the Lebanon's economy. The incident resurfaced the ethnic fault lines of the country that was already grappling with an inherited civil unrest coupled with on-going Covid-19-induced crisis. In 2020, on the personal side, the writer lost his close friend, who had also been my partner for more than four years. Meanwhile, I also survived the coronavirus and is still struggling to overcome the disease's long-term effects.

In sum, the year 2020 was quite an annus horribilis for the entire world, leaving behind the most difficult period we have ever had.