Doctors and nurses nodding off on their feet from sheer exhaustion. Police personnel, half-asleep, running to enforce restrictions at the crack of dawn. Sanitary workers going door to door to college garbage. Bank workers facilitating the payment of our medical and food bills. Journalists reporting from hospitals and health centers around the country. They and countless others who are doing their duties in these difficult times, often at great risk to their lives, are our heroes. 

Yet even among them, the work of medical and police personnel are tricky. Doctors and nurses cannot work from home nor do they have the option of reducing their contact points. Given their shortage in Nepal, many are working 12- to 16-hour days, testing, tending to the ill, responding to emergencies. The police personnel deployed to enforce the Covid-19 restrictive measures are as overworked, reporting to duty at 4.45 am every day and working non-stop for the next 16-18 hours. In return, instead of a sincere ‘thank you’, those defying prohibitory orders often bombard them with abuses. 

ApEx would like to thank each one of the frontline workers who are involved in saving lives or in facilitating, each in their own way, our daily, cooped-up existence. Our lives would be so much more difficult without you. Heck, we might not even be alive.