Wednesday, 30 December 2020
www.TheObserver.com
Vol. CXXXIII, No. 33
HAPPENING THIS WEEK Happy New Year! The Observer’s office will be closed New Year’s Eve & Day. We’ll reopen Monday, Jan. 4, at 10 a.m. BELLEVILLE • BLOOMFIELD • EAST NEWARK • HARRISON • KEARNY • LYNDHURST • NORTH ARLINGTON • NUTLEY
By Kevin Canessa kc@theobserver.com
H
ere’s a little mind game to play. Think about, if you can recall, what was on you mind on Dec. 31, 2019. Even if you can’t come up with your thoughts from that day, no doubt, none of us was thinking, “The year 2020 is going to be a nightmare of epic proportions.” Instead, we were all probably hoping for a 2020 that would be better than the year just
gone by. And here we are, at the precipice of 2021 -- and it’s a safe bet we’re all ready for it, with the hopes COVID-19 will become a hated memory, that facemasks will be something only sports players will need when they hit the ice of the turf, that we’ll be able to hug each other again, eat at a restaurant and not worry about the table nearest us … OK you get the picture. So as is tradition at The Observer, in the last edition of the calendar year, we take a look back at the stories that made headlines on
the print pages of the newspaper, on www.theobserver.com and in live-video reports over the last year. While some of the recap (anything Coronavirus-related) may be things some would rather forget, it is nonetheless important to remember that it did, indeed, happen -- and that it will soon, in totality, be of the past as we return to some semblance of normalcy. 1. THE NOVEL CORONAVIRUS OR COVID-19 TAKES HOLD OF JERSEY AND THE WORLD So after all that, we start right
with COVID-19 (as a reminder, there haven’t been 19 versions of the virus; instead, it gets its name from its year of origin -- 2019.) That, of course, was a myth started on talk radio and that fortunately didn’t spiral out of control as many other COVID myths did from the beginning. We began hearing about this virus in late 2019 -- and as 2020 progressed, one could tell, perhaps as early as February, that this thing, though in China, was going Continued on the next page