Recently, many of you shared your New Year's hopes and dreams with us.

We heard you wanted to dine out, go to graduations, travel.

It became clear that we are exhausted and we are even grieving for the kind of life that

we've lost in the past year.

I think it's fair to say that we would all love for our lives to go back to normal.

But the fact is we are approaching the second year of this coronavirus nightmare.

Things aren't really going well.

Every day thousands of people are dying, hospitals are overwhelmed, the vaccine roll out is happening,

but it's behind schedule.

And on top of that, there are new, more transmissible variants of the virus, like the one identified

in the UK, which has already found its way to 35 countries.

I don't want to mince words, and you probably already know this.

We're going to get through this, but the next few months are likely to be dark and painful.

For many of us, it's become hard to even imagine or remember what normal life could be.

But you know what, there are parts of the world where COVID-19 has not rocked the same

destruction.

And life has resumed.

Asia Pacific, especially, has emerged relatively unscathed, and places like New Zealand, and

Taiwan, and Singapore, they're doing really pretty well.

But what does that mean exactly?

What does doing pretty well mean in the midst of a pandemic?

Emily Liu, one of our associate producers, is from Singapore.

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