Article on covid 19 pendamic
its effects and precautions
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The COVID-19 pandemic is considered as the most crucial global health calamity of the century and the greatest challenge that the humankind faced since the 2nd World War. In December 2019, a new infectious respiratory disease emerged in Wuhan, Hubei province, China and was named by the World Health Organization as COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019). A new class of corona virus, known as SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) has been found to be responsible for occurrence of this disease. As far as the history of human civilization is concerned there are instances of severe outbreaks of diseases caused by a number of viruses. According to the report of the World Health Organization (WHO as of April 18 2020), the current outbreak of COVID-19, has affected over 2164111 people and killed more than 146,198 people in more than 200 countries throughout the world. Till now there is no report of any clinically approved antiviral drugs or vaccines that are effective against COVID-19. It has rapidly spread around the world, posing enormous health, economic, environmental and social challenges to the entire human population. The coronavirus outbreak is severely disrupting the global economy. Almost all the nations are struggling to slow down the transmission of the disease by testing & treating patients, quarantining suspected persons through contact tracing, restricting large gatherings, maintaining complete or partial lock down etc. This paper describes the impact of COVID-19 on society and global environment, and the possible ways in which the disease can be controlled has also been discussed therein. Pandemics in general are not merely serious public health concern, rather these trigger disastrous socio-economic and political crises in the infected countries. COVID-19, apart from becoming the greatest threat to global public health of the century, is being considered as an indicator of inequity and deficiency of social advancement. As is implied in the name COVID-19, ‘CO’ stands for ‘corona,’ ‘VI’ for ‘virus,’ and ‘D' for disease, and 19 represents the year of its occurrence. Coronavirus is a single stranded RNA virus with a diameter ranging from 80 to 120 nm. The first modern COVID-19 pandemic was reported in December 2019, in Wuhan, Hubei province, China and most initial cases were related to source infection from a seafood wholesale market (Huang et al., 2020). Since then, the disease rapidly circled the globe and has eventually affected every continent except Antarctica. It has been categorized as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (World Health Organization, 2020). International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) named the virus as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) (Gorbalenya et al., 2020). According to WHO, in 2002–2003, more than 8000 people suffered and 774 died of a coronavirus, called SARS. In 2012, MERS-CoV pandemic broke out infecting more than 2494 persons and killing over 858 lives worldwide (World Health Organization, 2004, World Health Organization, 2013). Coronaviruses belong to a large diverse family of viruses. These can be categorized into four genera namely, α-, β-, γ-, and δ. All the previously discussed coronaviruses responsible for worldwide spread of pandemic, namely SARS, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 are β-coronaviruses.
Apart from COVID-19, the human civilization has witnessed at least five pandemics in the current century, e.g. H1N1 in 2009, polio in 2014, Ebola (out broke in West Africa in 2014), Zika (2016) and Ebola (Democratic Republic of Congo in 2019). Subsequently COVID-19 outbreak has been declared as the sixth public health emergency of international concern on 30 Jan 2020 by the WHO. These worldwide outbreaks triggered a large number of fatalities, morbidities, and cost billions of dollars (Allocati et al., 2016; Fan et al., 2019). Compared to other diseases and their respective burdens, COVID-19 is likely to cause as much or greater human suffering than other contagious diseases in the whole world. In addition, other global environmental changes such as soil degradation, ozone layer depletion, pollution, and urbanization, changing environment creates an indisputable threat to our planet and human health. Global warming has its roots in industrial development, with the huge release of CO2 during the industrial revolution and beyond, finally allowing the greenhouse effect to take place. To some extent COVID-19 outbreak may be considered as an indirect consequence of global environmental changes. Besides its upsetting effects on human life, the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has the potential to significantly slowdown the economy not only of China, USA, or India but also of the world as a whole.