It would be entirely fair to say that the ‘arrival’ here of the coronavirus pandemic took the country’s education system by storm. Before that, politically, the fallout from the APNU/AFC government’s earlier loss of the no- confidence motion vote in the National Assembly had resulted in a national preoccupation with the implications of that eventuality as well as the equally relevant souring of the national political environment. In a country where even the most damaging of alternative social and economic emergencies usually take ‘second place’ to the never-ending jousting for political power, matters pertaining to the advent of the pandemic and its broader societal implications became ‘lost’ in the midst of the political agenda.
What that preoccupation meant during the earliest period of the pandemic was that the urgency of the malady became buried beneath the political preoccupations that had derived from the eventual outcome of the March 2020 general elections.