So, here we are, 2022!

In an era of regular sepia-tinted self-motivating e-posters stating “Every day is a new beginning”, the beginning of a new year is certainly celebrated and revered as a magical beginning of all great changes.

Billions of resolutions are made, some strong-willed, others not so much; from taking out the trash daily to quitting substance use.

However, all this positive vibe of a new year beginning has been marred to some extent in the last two years.

Since then, statisticians, medical professionals, astrologers and the common men have tried to predict the ending of this pandemic.

Thus, the beginning of 2022 has more come with trepidations, than the hope of normalcy.

But, how has the public sentiment adapted to the return of another year of this pandemic needs looking into, especially when the year-end introduced the new variant of Omicron and the celebration gatherings started showing a proportional rise in the number of COVID-19 infections.

The majority of the population has started to come to terms with the belief that we might never get back to the life that was usual before the pandemic.

These are great changes because eventually, life has to accept, adapt and adjust to a persistent stressor.

However, the persistence of the pandemic has also led to a sense of burnout and fatigue in the population, where the panic has been replaced with a sense of “indifference and helpless apathy”.

COVID protocols seem like a thing of the past, a reminder to mask up is either met with snarky remarks of being pedantic, or just a smirk.

The government, as well as the common man, has started to believe that social distancing cannot work for the long term.

Thus gatherings of all kinds, from political election rallies, religious celebrations and grand weddings are back in full grandeur.

Despite this change in public sentiment from fear to disregard, the thing that has not changed much is the constant supply of misinformation over social media.

The anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers continue to spread reasons not to follow whatever evidence-based practices that we have managed to come up with.

A section of social media is still busy spreading upscaled fear about the steeply increasing numbers, illness and deaths of celebrities etc., while the government sources fight tooth and nail to present more sugar-coated scenarios, thus leaving the mass in confused complacence.

Such is the “chaos” created within the civilized homo sapiens by a viral particle.

So, consulting in our busy clinics, we cannot but wonder what this new year of pandemic has in store for us.

We see the old patients who had dropped out two years back, because of the lockdown, returning to meet us, after the in-patient OPDs re-opened.

We see patients recovering slowly from the anxiety and mood disorders they had at the onset of the pandemic, and think to ourselves if these individuals have gathered enough resilience to sail through.

It makes us content to see when one person reminds another to pull their mask above the nose and he complies.

But, at the same time, the plastic screen on my table stands as a reminder of all the dreadful effects that this disease has left us with and that we still have a long road of uncertainty to walk.

Outside the clinics, the news of more and more acquaintances, colleagues and friends testing positive keeps rolling into the inbox, the departmental group sends daily reminders that the ‘cases’ are increasing, the resident doctors’ groups are abuzz with anticipation of COVID ICUs becoming busier over next few weeks and physicians wonder how much longer will “frontliners” bear the brunt of mass callousness in the name of duty!

The year seems to have come to check on how well we have learned from our mistakes in the last ‘new year’. The question that haunts us is whether we are forgetting the past a bit too early?

The pandemic will eventually cease, it’s up to us to decide what we take forward and how we deal with the scars left behind.

(Dr Chandrima Naskar is a Senior Resident, PGIMER, in Chandigarh and Dr Debanjan Banerjee is a Consultant Geriatric Psychiatrist, in Kolkata)