Congratulation! You survived until 2020! Emotionally, 2020 took about 12 months and 487 years. The beginning of a new decade in 2020, which many people looked forward to with enthusiasm and an opportunity for a new chapter in life. But by the end, everyone wondered what happened to 2020. Yet others have wondered over the past month whether this year will get worse and what is to come.
As people begin to embrace new ways of life under quarantine, they begin to integrate what happened in 2020. The Coronavirus is a new norm, but as countries are caught up in epidemics, some events in 2020 will be longer and will have the least memory of the ongoing transition cycle of news.
Australian Bushfire
2020, the year began with a tough Australian bushfire. In Australia, the bushfire season, dubbed Black Summer 2019, started with many intense and uncontrollable fires, mainly in the southeast of the country. Between December 2019 and January 2020, the fire that engulfed the area was extinguished.
Australia faces fire every year, but this year’s situation is unprecedented – after a wave of heat and global warming. More than one billion animals got killed, and nearly 2,000 homes are believed to be lost, with total economic damage and loss estimated to reach 100 billion.
COVID-19: “THE” Pandemic
At the end of February 2020, the World Health Organization raised the risk assessment of a new Coronavirus to its highest level. The virus, which began in China in December 2019, has already spread to dozens of countries. The WHO identified it on June 30; six months after the first reports of “a cluster of unknown cause pneumonia cases in China” were received. The organization’s officials have vigorously warned that COVID-19 was “not even close to over.”
The USA led the world in confirmed COVID-19 and deaths from the new Coronavirus, surpassing an astonishing 2.6 million cases by July 1 and killing more than 128,000 Americans.
Delhi Riots
Delhi’s 2020 riots caused several waves of violence, property destruction, and anxiety, killing 53 people. Most of them were from a minority community; they shot, kicked, and fired in northeastern Delhi. The battle between protesters and police has become the worst violence in decades in the capital. Due to these concerns, the Delhi subway and schools were sometimes closed.
Death of Kobe Bryant
On January 26, NBA legend Kobe Bryant was killed in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, California, which killed his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, and seven others. The news of Brian’s death surprised Los Angeles and the world. The 41-year-old has spent his entire 20-year career at the Los Angeles Lakers, winning five NBA championships and being widely recognized as one of the greatest players of all time.
Harvey Weinstein Convicted
On the same day as Kobe Bryant’s Los Angeles funeral, Harvey Weinstein was convicted of rape and sexual assault in New York. The allegations of dozens of women in 2017 have ruined their careers and led to a global movement #MeToo to make powerful men liable for their sexual misconduct. On March 11 of the same year, Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison, which many accused the Hollywood mogul believed he would never see.
Devastating Floods in Indonesia
Floods in the Indonesian capital Jakarta and neighboring cities in the early morning hours of January 1 killed 66 people, and almost 400,000 people had to flee their homes. At least 182 neighborhoods were submerged in the greater metropolitan area, flooding thousands of homes and buildings, including the Presidential Palace, and crippling transportation networks.
Most rivers in Jakarta’s big cities have broken the shore due to overnight rains, sending soil water to residential and commercial areas up to 5 feet deep. According to the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB), many victims have been drowned or buried under landslides. Many people died of hypothermia and electric shock.
Locusts Swarm
The worst invasions of the quarter-century included hundreds of billions of locust herds in parts of East Africa and South Asia, disrupting millions of food supplies. The Food Agriculture Organization said these could affect the food safety of 25 million people.
City-sized swarms of terrifying pests wreaked havoc on crops and forage, devouring everything in a matter of hours. The extent of this outbreak, which affected seven East African countries, has not been recently recalled.
Gas Plant Explosion in Nigeria
On March 15, an explosion at a gas processing plant killed at least 15 people and destroyed about 50 buildings after a fire broke out in the suburbs of Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital. The NNPC said the explosion occurred after several gas cylinders collided at a gas processing plant near the corporation’s pipeline in the Abule Addo area of Lagos State.
The blast knocked down nearby houses, damaged the NNPC pipeline, and the corporation halted pumping operations on the Atlas Co-seasonal pipeline, the state oil company said in a statement.
Tensions With Iran
In early 2020, many feared that the United States was on the brink of war with Iran. Iranian General Qassem Solaimani and others were killed near Baghdad International Airport in a US airstrike on January 3. A few months after tensions between the two countries increased, Iran finally retaliated in a ballistic missile attack targeting US troops in Iraq on January 7.
Hours later, on January 8, a Ukrainian jetliner was accidentally shot dead by Iranian Revolutionary Guards, after the government repeatedly denied responsibility for Western allegations. It killed all 176 people on board.
On a lighter note…
Poland Accidentally Invaded the Czech Republic
Accidental attacks are not common, but they remain uncommon. In a minor misunderstanding, the Polish military recently invaded the Czech Republic and briefly occupied it – preventing locals from entering the church in their country, NPR reported. The misunderstanding was quickly cleared, and the Polish army withdrew.
Let’s be real: At this point, all of our brains seem like worms, nothing real; we live in imitation. 2021 Here We Come, Baby!
