The Modern Day Apocalypse

Chapter 1: Reflecting

January 30th 2020.

I woke today and looked at my phone, a news article that had popped into my notifications interested me, it talked of some virus in Wuhan China that was making people very ill. Apparently something to do with an illegal market and bats.
I didn't think much more of it and spent the day as usual; made myself a cup of my favourite ginger chai tea and browsed my Instagram. I then took my uncles dog for a walk along the shore in the rain.
It was a decent day, though I didn't do very much if I'm quite honest. I was trying to better different aspects of my life and decided to create a new Instagram (sort of like a blog) to post random pictures without feeling judged or clogging up the feed of people who follow my normal more professional account.
I spent the next few weeks hiking, walking the dog, visiting friends and enjoying the fact I had 3 whole months without work before my new job was to start out in France in April.
Through these weeks though, I kept getting new notifications from my news app about this Corona virus. I kept reading up on it as I found it interesting and soon memes about it started appearing on my Facebook and even people who aren't really "with the times", like my dad, were talking about it.

In my uncles house we didn't watch TV so I'm unsure how much news coverage the virus had back in January but I'm sure that when March came around there would've been a lot.
Around the 16th of March it became obvious how serious this virus was, Italy seemed to take the biggest hit out of all the countries and was even more infected than China, it felt so unreal hearing that their entire country had gone into lock down.
My friends and I started joking about the end of the world and how it was like the start of an apocalypse. I heard older folk say how crazy it was, that in their entire lives they'd never had something like this happen before.

The news started calling it a global pandemic, as I listened to the news more and more it became almost frightening as they listed more and more countries infected each day. The numbers of people with the virus kept going up and up. The number of deaths caused in relation to the virus also continued to go up.

On March 23rd 2020, Boris Johnson (the not very well-liked prime minister of the UK) finally decided to put the whole of the UK on lockdown. Putting into place rules of isolation for at least two weeks. The British army with the police force patrolled streets to give fines and if necessary, other measures to people that didn't obey this.
The rules were quite lenient though, you could go out of your home to exercise so long as you did it either by yourself or with the people you were in isolation with (usually your family), you could go to the supermarket for essentials and you were allowed to travel if it was essential. Supermarkets, banks and post offices were some of the only businesses allowed to be left open.
People started taking photos when they were out and posting them on social media, it was very odd seeing how empty everything was.
"Truly apocalyptic" I thought.

Little did any of us know this 2week isolation period would go on to last for 5months. All the major economic countries put billions of pounds into finding a cure and eventually in early August it was broadcasted globally that they had finally developed a vaccine and were already in the process of making and distributing it. That soon each country would slowly be cleared of the virus finally, and that everything would return to normal.
We were all assured that in another two or three weeks we'd be free to walk the streets, see our friends and families and no longer live in fear. Many people began to get excited planning big celebrations for when they finally got to see one another again. The end of this long, scary road was finally in sight.

Or at least that's what we thought.

The first cases must of started only 2months after the first wave of people had been vaccinated, but once the government had realised what was happening it was covered up. It took another 6months before it got really bad, before it was broadcasted, and by that time it was definitely too late.