My name is Mariana Mesa Castillo, I am from Bogotá, Colombia and I have been quarantined for almost 200 days.
I am currently a freshman at the University of Kentucky, which means I was part of the class of 2020, the ones who were born around 9/11 and graduated high school in the middle of a pandemic through zoom.
Maybe saying my situation with the pandemic has been worse than other people's is selfish, due to the fact that I have an apartment where to sleep, food and my family has managed to stay together. But these months have been significantly hard for my family and our mental health.
But let's go back to where it all started; our president declared mandatory lockdown on March 14, 2020, when the country had around 10 cases. At the beginning, everyone thought it was the best call, but as days became weeks and weeks became months we realized the virus wasn't going away and being locked up was only prolonging the pandemic's peak. The only thing we accomplished by being on lockdown since March, other than causing our economy to almost fully collapse, was beating the record for the longest quarantine in the world.
This is Bogotá, the city I was born and raised in. It also happens to be Colombia's capital. With around eleven million people. we have had the most COVID cases in the entire country.
