Anonymous 2m 544 #covid19
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
The virus has changed the lives of all groups of people, and as a university student, I am going to talk about those changes in the lives of the people who are in their twenties. First and foremost, the biggest difference after the hit of the virus lies in how people work or study. Normally, for university students, all the relationships and different types of experiences they get to do in the campus are referred to as ‘Campus Life’ by Koreans, and it is considered as the most beautiful part of one’s twenties. It’s what high school students study hard for. However, unfortunately, we couldn’t go to school for a whole semester, and maybe also the upcoming semesters too, so many students, especially the freshmen, were actually disappointed at their kind of boring lives, just staying home and watching the video lecture, doing assignments.
We, the people in their 20s, have been at the center of the blame during the crisis. We were said to be not wearing the mask properly, and just visiting anywhere. (Of couse this is not true for the majority of the people, but about some irresponsible young guys. When the virus seemed to be almost gone in Korea-the confirmed cases were less than 10 per day-, 2 young men went to four night clubs during just one night, which is surprising with this fact itself. Obviously, they had the virus and lead to so many different infected cases all over the country again. Many people were just so mad because even though we also want to play and do whatever, we were being responsible and kept the social distance to genuinely end the situation, unlike the two of them!
Actually, the serious problems are the ones about people’s work. Quite a lot of people have lost their jobs or had an unpaid/underpaid vacation, which is very likely to bring about a huge decrease in their income. It does not only applies for people who work in tourism industry, which is why Korean government has decided to offer some financial support to every single citizen. So, approximately everyone gets $300 from the government without any condition and one can also refuse to receive it, which means they donate the money for the ones seriously in need. With this help from the government, many people are saying that things are actually getting better. One of the biggest issues during the COVID crisis was that people are not able to visit any store, which has put all the small market owners in such hard conditions. The citizens are now going back to their normal lives, though redundant transportations are unrecommended, and they are very willing to spend the ‘free money’ they’ve got from the government. It can only be used in non-franchise local shops, so it is actually helping the owners.
Okay, so this is how Korean people are coping with the virus so far. It has been inconvenient and brought a lot of disappointments, but people have started to get familiar with it and find the good aspects of the current lifestyle. Also, we sincerely hope this ends soon and we can get back to ‘normal’, just like the whole world does. Thanks for reading! 😊
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