Article on novel coronavirus written Adnan Bhat

Poonch,April 05:–The novel corona virus has given rise to a global pandemic that has destabilized most institutional settings. While we live in times when humankind possesses the
most advanced science and technology, a virus invisible to the naked eye has massively disrupted our lives, economies, healthcare, and education systems
worldwide.

2. Given the corona virus’s current situation, some households have also had time to
   introspect on gender roles and stereotypes. For instance, women are expected to
   carry out household chores like cooking, cleaning, and looking after the family. With
   men sharing household chores responsibilities during the lockdown period, it gives hope that they will realize the burden that women have been bearing and will
   continue sharing such responsibilities.
3. This tough period also gave people some time to reflect on the importance of
   keeping themselves fit. With sufficient time in hand, people started investing their
   time learning new ways to exercise. Those who never exercised before, giving
   excuses of busy lives, too developed some new habits of Yoga, Pranayam and
   exercises during the lockdown period. These new habits and people’s increased
   focus on their health, wellness and immunity will surely change the way we lead our
   lives even in future.
4. The nature too healed itself during the lockdown period. Restricted human
   movement led to better air quality, cleaner water bodies and joyful wildlife
   movements. The human beings, we hope, reflected during this time, how some of
   their unconscious activities cause disruption in nature and worked out ways to
   adopt environmental-friendly options for their activities in future.
5. This situation also affected the education sector to a great extent. It has forced us to
   shift from offline to online mode of teaching-learning process, almost immediately
   without prior preparation. Is it giving us a peek into the reality ahead? Technology￾enabled teaching is definitely the future we are looking towards, but it is important to identify key challenges for students and teachers in the current scenario. Once identified, academic leadership and the government can address these through innovations in the focused areas to minimise the effect of pandemic on the education of the students.
6. The current scenario has also affected our economies to the extent wherein many
   businessmen had to bear heavy losses in their businesses. The governments and
   individuals need to take actions to mitigate risk and minimize transmission while
   maintaining social and economic activities. However, relaxed control measures,
   declining risk perception and the understandable desire to return to normalcy have led to reduced protective behaviour and more social and workplace interactions,
   often in confined, close-contact settings, where the virus spreads really fast.
7. It is our responsibility that we take all necessary precautions through mask-wearing, physical distancing, hand hygiene as part of daily life. It is highly important to make these new behaviour part of our everyday habits. Travelling to new places, casual café visits with a large bunch of friends, spending our weekends in shopping,
   window-shopping and casual strolls, large gatherings in birthday parties and other
   celebrations; will require some modifications and patience to fit into “New Normal” keeping all the safety norms in mind.
8. We are sure that regular communication from authorities, improved understanding
   of individual responsibility and, subsequently, a greater willingness to adopt
   infection prevention practices can be a stepping stone to a “new future”.