Welcome to new year 2020. 2020 justified itself to call it as new year by bringing entirely new unusual terms in to our lives. These terms sounds strange to us but those are the only ways to curb the deadly virus that we are suffering now .And here comes those terms, they are: social distancing and lockdown .Along with these terms, some hash tags that came in to our lives are, #stayhome, #staysafe etc…,
Well, the history of birth of those terms is here. those are the days when we were almost to say goodbye to 2019.At that time this virus, which we named it as corona virus, took birth in a place called Wuhan in china. In the initial days, Chinese government didn’t recognize the dark side of this deadly virus. Later, it started spreading to many other countries, till date, irrespective of status of the countries, corona virus spreaded to 212 countries including territories. Instead calling it as corona virus we named it as covid-19.
Social distancing and lockdown showing high impact on many sectors. These unusual terms,literally,made our lives upside down. Their impact has positive effect as well as negative effect on our lives.
01. SOCIAL DISTANCING:
The term ‘social distancing’ refers to the practice of maintaining physical distance from other people or avoiding direct contact with people or objects in public places during the outbreak of contagious diseases in order to reduce the transmission of infection. Social distancing is practiced in case of covid-19 because it spreads through contact with one and the other person and it is one of the best way to curb covid-19.
Generally, we know fever, cold, are communicable infections. But we don’t pay much attention to those infections and we don’t maintain social distance with the persons those who are affected. These infections seems smaller when compared to virus but to a greater extent they may become harmful and in some cases may kill our lives. Now, this virus showed clearly that how dangerous the communicable infections and diseases are. In this pandemic situation, it showed a positive effect on people. This situation realized people that how social distancing is important in case of communicable diseases.

CASE STUDY-

A case study which i observed in urban areas and rural areas in case of social distancing. In urban areas people are educated and they know the consequences if social distance is not practiced. Even then they refused in the initial days when government declared to maintain social distance. But later i do agree that with the treatment of our brave hero’s i.e., police, social distancing is now being practiced in urban areas. In rural areas, though people are not that much educated compared to the people in urban areas. They, from the first day, started maintaining social distancing in every place like general stores, ration shops etc, it is clearly seen that the impact is more on rural area people compared to people of urban area. At the end of the day, everyone following it strictly and being unity to prevent it.
According to few psychological experts, not only in case of virus, maintaining social distance with people is always better. Central government as well as state government‘s took a best decision to impose social distancing in society and it is a kind of way forward to curb covid -19. It the time to appreciate our government from the bottom of our hearts, that it shown a better way to stop the spread of virus and officials, policemen who are working on it to maintain it by people.
📍What is the impact if social distancing is not followed?
Social distancing is the foremost thing that every citizen should follow in order to stop the spread of virus. If social distancing is not practiced, the consequences hit harder than we think. Death toll increases and virus positive cases increases on a higher rate. These type of consequences araises if social distancing is not followed.
02.LOCKDOWN:
Lockdown ……a very unfamiliar word that turned in to a familiar word to us. We may call lockdown as a synonym of house arrest[informally].successfully we completed lockdown 1,lockdown 2,and now we are in the stage of lockdown 3.0. Many countries considered lockdown as an effective measure in slowing the spread of virus around the world. Few countries like India, SouthAfrica,Belgium,Australia, China,NewZealand,TheUK,Kuwait,Saudi Arabia etc,.. Government’s imposed full/partial lockdowns in their respective countries. The decision of our Indian central government to impose full lockdown, in return getting good response from citizens seems everything is going to be well in our nation.
Lockdown has positive impact as well as negative impact on our country and lives of people. Lockdown shows more negative impact than positive impact, even then our central government didn’t step back because the only aim of our central government is welfare and well-being of people. lockdown has its impact on two things. One is country and other is on its people.

When it comes to positive impact, we got much more time to resettle/repair the things that are in public usage like roads, dams[for example,GHMC repairing the roads].Because of lockdown, there is no transportation; no transportation, no harmful gas emissions; no harmful gas emissions, no pollution; no pollution, mother earth started healing itself. As nature is using this time to heal and repair itself. From many days, our government trying to clean the Ganga river. Due to this lockdown, it became possible and the whole Ganga river was cleaned. We can admit it as lockdown gift to us. Before lockdown ,due to heavy pollution, ozone layer depletion took place. But now with this lockdown, ozone layer fixing itself which scientists identified it. Lockdown has greater impact on families. It bought many families together[but few people are away from their families].it gave enough time to spend with families. People can know the true value of families and may stop neglecting them like before lockdown.

When it comes to negative effect, there are many sectors that hit hard. The first thing in the row is our economy. We came to a situation where our government officials are getting 50% of their salaries and pensioners getting 50%-75% of their pension. But the best thing is that the rest of money is used to fight against virus. We can understand how our economy is deteriorating with the outbreak of virus.
The other source of economy is via exports and imports.Now,exports and imports are stopped. Industries and factories are closed. The supply of raw materials from other countries is stopped. Here, it is clearly seen the deterioration of our economy. There are five worst hit sectors due to lockdown:
Aviation.
Retail.
Financials.
Real-estate.
Automobiles.
Education sector is one among those which saw the negative impact of lockdown. Schools, colleges, universities are closed.With the shut down of educational institutons,there came the role of technology and internet. Online classes are started. The worrying thing here is that the platform which we are using for online classes is a Chinese platform[zoom app].To a greater extent, educational institutions experiencing the worst hit of lockdown.
Trade activities are stopped. Tourism is affected. People of our country who works in abroad are unable to reach there motherland.Inter-national boarders as well as Intra-national borders are closed. Demand of goods is decreasing. Unemployment rate increased than before. People who live on their daily wages, now they don’t get any work to do. They are suffering to fulfill their basic needs.

What if lockdown is not imposed :

If the lockdown is not imposed, the spread of virus will be much more than our imagination. If there is no lockdown, people start moving from one place to other place. this is one of the utmost thing that we have to avoid in order to stop the spread of virus. If we move from one place to other place, virus starts travelling to many places and the consequences of that spread will be terrible. In order to avoid all these irreparable damages, government imposed lockdown.

To combat virus, social distancing and lockdown are playing a crucial role. We learned and learning many lessons from this experience. One should be conscious and aware that none of the lessons that we learned from this experience should not go in vain. Even we are maintaining social distance and lockdown, there is greater unity in our people and are standing against the virus and helping to curb the virus.India,once again proved that unity in diversity is still existed and will exist forever.

JAI HIND.