COVID-19 Lockdown: Staying home is all we have...for now

We can protect ourselves, our families and neighbours from COVID-19 by staying home, observing physical distancing and regularly washing our hands with soap.

This information has been iterated by health professionals across the world and rightly so—thousands of lives depend on everyone actively taking these measures.

In Maldives, to observe this is has become more vital now than ever. With the confirmation of the first person who tested positive for COVID-19 in the capital city Male', our collective futures presently depend on all of our actions.

Being young is a privilege, as is the blessing of a healthy life without pre-existing medical conditions. Especially considering the fact that health professionals believe that old age and pre-existing medical conditions are risk factors that increase the chances of complications for COVID19

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean everyone else is safe. This disease has the potential to be fatal for anyone who contracts it, as can be seen by the number of young people that have died due to the illness.

Physical distancing is not important just because it can protect ourselves from COVID-19. To the contrary, its importance lies in the individual responsibility we have towards the safety and health of our society as a whole.

Think again about those risk factors. The ones that have increasingly led to fatal circumstances due to COVID19.

There are senior citizens, like our beloved parents, and people of different ages who are at risk due to pre-existing illnesses. In our small society, the people who fit these vulnerable groups are all people that we know.

Members of our families, our neighbours or our colleagues—ultimately people who we care about a lot, people we worry about when they fall ill.

Even with the false sense of security that our youth provides us with, we cannot falter in physical distancing practices because of the collective responsibility each and every one of us has towards protecting our most vulnerable.

We can only consider ourselves safe and healthy when our actions ensure the protection of other people—people whose lives might depend on our action, or rather our inaction, at this crucial point in time.

The actions that we can control and put in place are practising safe physical distancing, staying home, regular hand and respiratory hygiene and following the advice and instructions of the Health Protection Agency and other relevant authorities.

The future of this viral outbreak depends on us and what all of us do now—physically distant but together.