|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
Covid-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also called the coronavirus
pandemic, is a current pandemic of coronavirus disease
2019 (COVID-19). It is caused by severe acute
respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The
outbreak started in Wuhan, Hubei, China, in December
2019. The World Health Organization (WHO) called it a
pandemic on 11 March 2020. The International Committee
on Taxonomy of Viruses gave the virus its name. As of
November 28, more than 60 million cases of COVID-19 have
been reported in more than 188 countries and
territories. More than one million people have died of
COVID-19, and more than 23 million people have defeated,
or recovered from the disease.
The virus usually moves from one person to another with
small drops made when coughing People can avoid
spreading the virus by regularly washing their hands,
covering their mouth when coughing, maintaining distance
from other people, staying away from crowds, wearing
medical or cloth face coverings, and being alone for
people who think they are infected, also known as
quarantining.
The outbreak might be from a coronavirus that usually
lives in bats. This infected another animal, possibly a
pangolin. It then changed inside that other animal until
it could infect humans. |
|
|
List of terminology
associated with COVID-19 |
- SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes
COVID-19
- 2019-nCoV is the old name for
SARS-CoV-2
- Coronavirus disease 2019 is another
name for COVID-19
- community spread is the spread of
the disease without a known travel connection
- clusters are groups of COVID-19
cases in which many people in the same area became
infected with COVID-19
- lockdown
- presumptive confirmed positive
- quarantine
- sealed off
|
Epidemiology
Epidemiology is the study of how diseases affect the health
and illness of groups of people
Background
On 31 December 2019, Chinese health authorities reported to
the World Health Organization (WHO) a cluster of viral
pneumonia cases of unknown cause in Wuhan, and an
investigation was launched in early January 2020.
On 9 June 2020, a Harvard University study suggested that
COVID-19 may have been spreading in China as early as August
2019, based on hospital car park usage and web search
trends.
Cases
Cases means the number of people who have been tested for
COVID-19 and have tested positive.
Deaths
Most people who contract COVID-19 recover. For those who do
not, the time between the start of symptoms and death
usually ranges from 6 to 41 days, typically about 14 days.
Duration
On 11 March 2020, the WHO said that the pandemic could be
controlled.
Symptoms
According to the United States Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, COVID-19 makes people feel sick in different
ways, but it usually affects the lungs. People usually cough
and have difficulty breathing. They often also have a fever,
chills, headache, pain in their muscles, or trouble tasting
or smelling things.
According to an April 2020 study by the American
Gastroenterological Association, COVID-19 can make sick
people vomit or have diarrhea, but this is rare. They said
about 7.7% of COVID-19 patients vomited, about 7.8% had
diarrhea and about 3.6% had pain in their stomachs. |
 |
| The CDC and WHO
advise that masks reduce the spread of
coronavirus. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen
pictured. |
Name
In February 2020, the WHO announced a name for the disease
caused by SARS-CoV-2: COVID-19. It replaced the name
"2019-nCoV." "Covi" is for "coronavirus," "D" for "disease,"
and "19" for the year 2019. They said they did not want the
name to have any person, place, or animal in it because
people might blame the disease on that place, person, or
animal. For example, it did not use the word "Wuhan." They
also wanted the name to be easy to say out loud.
Mortality rate of COVID-19
According to an article in Market Watch dated on February
27, 2020, the overall case mortality rate in China was 2.3%.
However, there were large differences between different age
groups and between men and women. People over the age of
seventy experienced a rate of mortality 4-5 times that of
the average. Men were more likely to die than women (2.8%
versus 1.7% for women). These numbers were the conclusion of
a study by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and
Prevention using 72,314 COVID-19 cases in mainland China as
of Feb. 11. At that point this was the largest sample of
cases for such a study.
On March 5, 2020, the WHO released the case fatality rate. |
 |
| Infographic by the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC), describing how to stop the spread of
germs. |
Race and racism
COVID-19 did not affect everyone in each country the same
way. As of May 2020, APM Research Lab said the death rate
among black Americans was 2.4 times as high as for whites
and 2.2 times as high as for Latino and Asian Americans. In
July 2020, The New York Times printed data from the Centers
for Disease Control showing that black and Latino Americans
were three times as likely to become sick and twice as
likely to die as white Americans. This was not only in large
cities but also in rural areas. This was not only for old
people but for people in all age groups. Native Americans
were also more likely than whites to become sick and die.
Asian Americans were 1.3 times as likely as whites to become
sick.
Camara Jones, an epidemiologist who once worked for the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this was
socioeconomic and not because of any natural difference in
black and white people's bodies. In the United States, black
citizens are more likely to work jobs where they serve the
public and to ride on buses and trains rather than take
their own cars to work, which makes them more likely to be
infected than people who work in private offices or from
home. Sharrelle Barber, an epidemiologist and
biostatistician from Drexel University, also said black
Americans can live in crowded neighborhoods where social
distancing is harder to do and healthy food harder to find.
Both Barber and Jones blamed the long history of racism in
the United States for these things. Three senators, Kamala
Harris, Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren said the federal
government should start recording the race of COVID-19
patients so scientists could study this problem.
In June, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
(CMS) told the public that people using the United States'
government's Medicare health program had different results
depending on race. Four times as many black Medicare
patients went to hospitals for COVID-19 than white Medicare
patients. There were twice as many hospitalized Hispanic
patients than white patients. There were three hospitalized
Asian patients for every two hospitalized white patients.
The head of CMS, Seema Verma, said this was mostly because
of socioeconomic status.
In the United Kingdom, twice as many black COVID-19 patients
died as white COVID-19 patients. Other non-white people,
like people from India and Bangledesh, were also more likely
to die of COVID-19 than whites. Britain's Office of National
Statistics said that the differences in money and education
explained some of this difference but not all of it. They
also said they did not know whether non-white patients
caught COVID-19 more often or whether they caught more
severe cases. Only female Chinese Britons were less likely
to die of COVID-19 than white Britons.
Indigenous peoples
Native Americans in the United States have shown more deaths
from COVID-19 than the rest of the U.S. As of May, the
Navajo Nation had 88 deaths and 2,757 cases, and the money
they had been promised by the government arrived several
weeks late. Only 30% of the people in the Navajo Nation have
pipes with running water, which made it difficult for people
to wash their hands.
Scientists from Chapman University made a plan to protect
the Tsimane people in Bolivia from COVID-19 and said this
plan would also work for other indigenous peoples living on
their own land. The scientists said that many indigenous
peoples have problems that make COVID-19 more dangerous for
them, like poverty, less clean water, and other lung
diseases. Hospitals may be a long distance away, and racism
can affect the way doctors and nurses react. But they also
sometimes have things that help, like traditions of making
decisions together and the ability to grow food nearby. The
scientists found people who spoke the Tsimane language as a
first language and made teams to go to Tsimane towns to warn
them about COVID-19. They also used radio stations. They
said the best plan was for whole communities to decide to
isolate. They found this worked well because the Tsimane
already usually made their big decisions together as a
community in special meetings and already had a tradition of
quarantining new mothers. The Chapman scientists said their
plan would also work for other indigenous peoples who also
make decisions together, like the Tsimane. The Waswanipi
Cree in Canada, the Mapoon people in Australia, and many
groups in South America already tried plans like these on
their own.
George Floyd protests
In May 2020, police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota
killed an unarmed black man called George Floyd while they
were arresting him. There were weeks of protests all over
the world against police racism. Experts said they were
worried protesters and police could spread SARS-CoV-2 to
each other. Other experts said some of the reasons that the
protests were so big was because non-white people were being
killed by COVID-19 more than white people were, because poor
leadership in the COVID-19 crisis reminded them of poor
leadership about racism, and because the lockdowns shut down
workplaces and other things. This meant people had more time
to protest. |
|
Conspiracy theories
In early 2020, some people began to think that the
SARS-CoV-2 may have been made on purpose in a laboratory
and either released by accident or on purpose like a
weapon. Some Iranians thought the Americans might have
made it. Chinese state media said COVID-19 came from the
United States to China and not the other way around.
Some Americans thought the Chinese might have made it.
Some Britons thought it might have been created by
accident by 5G cell phone networks.
On March 17, 2020, scientists from Columbia University
and other places published a paper in Nature Medicine
showing that SARS-CoV-2 was almost surely not made by
humans in a laboratory. They did this by comparing the
genomes of different viruses to each other. The
scientists saw that SARS-CoV-2 did not match any of the
viral backbones that already exist for virologists to
use. Within a few weeks, it became one of the most cited
scientific papers in history, meaning that other
scientists were reading and using it.
Timelines of COVID-19
On December 31, 2019, China alerted WHO to several cases
of unusual pneumonia in Wuhan, Hubei province.
On January 20, 2020, Chinese premier Li Keqiang called
for efforts to stop and control the pneumonia epidemic
caused by a novel coronavirus. As of February 5, 2020,
24,588 cases have been confirmed, including in every
province-level division of China. A larger number of
people may have been infected, but not detected
(especially mild cases). The first local transmission of
the virus outside China occurred in Vietnam between
family members, while the first local transmission not
involving family occurred in Germany, on January 22,
when a German man contracted the disease from a Chinese
business visitor at a meeting. As of 5 February 2020,
493 deaths have been attributed to the virus since the
first confirmed death on January 9, with 990 recoveries.
The first death outside China was reported in the
Philippines, in a 44-year-old Chinese male on February
1., but another source reported: "The first cases of
COVID-19 outside of China were identified on January 13
in Thailand and on January 16 in Japan".
There has been testing which have showed over 6000
confirmed cases in China, some of whom are healthcare
workers.
Confirmed cases have also been reported in Thailand,
South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Macau, Hong Kong, the United
States (Everett, Washington and Chicago), Singapore,
Vietnam, France and Nepal.
The World Health Organization declared that this is a
Public Health Emergency of International Concern since
January 30, 2020.
Bloomberg News and other business publications have
reported several plant closures, travel restrictions,
and imposed quarantines as a result of this outbreak.
As of February 10, 2020 there have been 40,235 confirmed
cases reported of people infected by the virus in China.
Also reported were 909 deaths, and 319 cases in 24 other
countries, including one death, according to WHO chief
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
On November 14, 2020, there were 53,853,718 global
COVID-19 cases and 1,311,524 deaths with cases in 217
countries and territories.
Visit the Kiddle link below to see additional
information and updates. |
 |
| Coronavirus fears
have led to panic buying of essentials across
the world, including toilet paper, dried and
instant noodles, bread, rice, vegetables,
disinfectant, and rubbing alcohol. |
Food and hunger
The pandemic made it more difficult for millions of
people all over the world to get enough food. People
lost their jobs, so they did not have money to buy food.
Farms were shut down, so there was less food made.
Processing plants and food factories were shut down, so
less food was made ready for people to eat.
In April, Arif Husain of the United Nations' World Food
Program said that 130 million more people could go
hungry, in addition to the 135 million who were already
hungry before the pandemic began. He said that poorer
countries would be more affected than rich countries
because the way they move raw food from farms to cities
and other places where people live is less organized and
relies more on human beings than on automatic systems.
This hunger crisis is different from crises in other
years because it happened to the whole world at the same
time. That meant that people working in other countries
could not help by sending money home.
All over the world, children who ate meals at school had
less access to food when the schools were shut down.
Scientists from the University of Michigan said the
pandemic was making it harder for people to find food.
In a study published in May, they said out of of seven
Americans over age 50 said they had trouble getting
enough food before the pandemic, and it got worse when
senior centers that provided meals were closed. Federal
and state governments started programs to bring food to
older people and children. There were also more food
donation drives in towns.
Old people
In the United States, nursing homes had some of the
highest rates of infection and death, 40% of all
COVID-19 deaths in the country. Nursing homes are group
homes for old people who need medical care, for disabled
people who need medical care, and for people recovering
from severe sickness or injury, like stroke patients.
Many people who live in nursing homes pay through the
government program Medicaid, which pays less than
Medicare or regular insurance companies. In June, many
American nursing homes were caught throwing their
regular patients out so they could make room for
COVID-19 patients who could pay them more. Because
nursing homes had stopped allowing visitors, it took
longer for them to get caught. United States law
requires nursing homes to warn patients 30 days before
kicking them out, but the nursing homes did not do this.
Some of the nursing homes took the COVID-19 patients
because state governments asked them to and they say
they sent their elderly residents away because they were
worried they would catch COVID-19 from the sick
patients. |
 |
| Images from the NASA
Earth Observatory show a stark drop in pollution
in Wuhan, when comparing NO2 levels in early
2019 (top) and early 2020 (bottom). |
Environment
Because so many governments told people to stay at home,
there was less air pollution than usual for that time of
year. Pollution in New York fell by 50% and the use of
coal in China fell by 40%. The European Space Agency
showed pictures taken from a satellite of China's
pollution disappearing during quarantine and coming back
when everyone went back to work.
The pandemic and shutdowns made people use less
electricity. In the United States, people got less of
their electricity from coal power but kept using gas and
renewable power like wind and solar power. This was
because coal plants are more expensive to run, so power
companies used them less.
Pollution from before the pandemic also affected what
happened after people became sick. Scientists saw that
more people died from COVID-19 in places with large
amounts of air pollution. One team of scientists from
Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg looked at air
pollution information from satellites and statistics on
COVID-19 deaths in Italy, France, Germany and Spain and
saw that places with large amounts of nitrogen dioxide
pollution had more people die from COVID-19. Nitrogen
dioxide can damage the lungs.
The shutdowns and social distancing also affected
animals. Human beings started staying at home about the
same time in the spring when sea turtles like to come on
land to lay their eggs. Turtle scientists in the United
States and Thailand both reported more nests than usual
on seashores in Florida and Phuket. They say it is
because people are not coming to the beach or bringing
their dogs to the beach and because there are fewer
boats in the water nearby. Scientists also say they see
more dugong and dolphins. With fewer cars driving down
roads, salamanders, frogs, and other amphibians were
able to cross them for their spring migration. According
to citizen scientists from Big Night Maine, a group that
watches amphibians, four amphibians made it across the
roads alive for every one amphibian killed by cars. Most
years, it is only two to one.
Not all ocean mammals did well. According to marine
biologists in Florida, manatee deaths in April and May
were 20% higher than in 2019. They say this was because
many people decided to go boating because other things
to do were closed. |
|
Stopping the next pandemic
Researchers from the San Diego Zoo Global had the idea
for a system that people could use to find dangerous
germs before they become pandemics or even before they
jump from other animals to humans. They said it was
important to watch the wildlife trade, like in the Wuhan
wet market. The scientists said that over the past
eleven years it has gotten easier and easier to sequence
viral genomes, and it does not have to be done by a
large lab or by a government any more. The scientists
said it would be better to spread the work out among
more people. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Search Fun Easy English |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
About
Contact
Copyright
Resources
Site Map |
