two paragraph essay about your definition of global pandemic covid 19

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COVID-19 Pandemic

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 11, 2024 | Original: April 25, 2023

The outbreak of the infectious respiratory disease known as COVID-19 triggered one of the deadliest pandemics in modern history. COVID-19 claimed nearly 7 million lives worldwide. In the United States, deaths from COVID-19 exceeded 1.1 million, nearly twice the American death toll from the 1918 flu pandemic . The COVID-19 pandemic also took a heavy toll economically, politically and psychologically, revealing deep divisions in the way that Americans viewed the role of government in a public health crisis, particularly vaccine mandates. While the United States downgraded its “national emergency” status over the pandemic on May 11, 2023, the full effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will reverberate for decades.

A New Virus Breaks Out in Wuhan, China

In December 2019, the China office of the World Health Organization (WHO) received news of an isolated outbreak of a pneumonia-like virus in the city of Wuhan. The virus caused high fevers and shortness of breath, and the cases seemed connected to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, which was closed by an emergency order on January 1, 2020.

After testing samples of the unknown virus, the WHO identified it as a novel type of coronavirus similar to the deadly SARS virus that swept through Asia from 2002-2004. The WHO named this new strain SARS-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2). The first Chinese victim of SARS-CoV-2 died on January 11, 2020.

Where, exactly, the novel virus originated has been hotly debated. There are two leading theories. One is that the virus jumped from animals to humans, possibly carried by infected animals sold at the Wuhan market in late 2019. A second theory claims the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research lab that was studying coronaviruses. U.S. intelligence agencies maintain that both origin stories are “plausible.”

The First COVID-19 Cases in America

The WHO hoped that the virus outbreak would be contained to Wuhan, but by mid-January 2020, infections were reported in Thailand, Japan and Korea, all from people who had traveled to China.

On January 18, 2020, a 35-year-old man checked into an urgent care center near Seattle, Washington. He had just returned from Wuhan and was experiencing a fever, nausea and vomiting. On January 21, he was identified as the first American infected with SARS-CoV-2.

In reality, dozens of Americans had contracted SARS-CoV-2 weeks earlier, but doctors didn’t think to test for a new type of virus. One of those unknowingly infected patients died on February 6, 2020, but her death wasn’t confirmed as the first American casualty until April 21.

On February 11, 2020, the WHO released a new name for the disease causing the deadly outbreak: Coronavirus Disease 2019 or COVID-19. By mid-March 2020, all 50 U.S. states had reported at least one positive case of COVID-19, and nearly all of the new infections were caused by “community spread,” not by people who contracted the disease while traveling abroad. 

At the same time, COVID-19 had spread to 114 countries worldwide, killing more than 4,000 people and infecting hundreds of thousands more. On March 11, the WHO made it official and declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

The World Shuts Down

Pandemics are expected in a globally interconnected world, so emergency plans were in place. In the United States, health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set in motion a national response plan developed for flu pandemics.

State by state and city by city, government officials took emergency measures to encourage “ social distancing ,” one of the many new terms that became part of the COVID-19 vocabulary. Travel was restricted. Schools and churches were closed. With the exception of “essential workers,” all offices and businesses were shuttered. By early April 2020, more than 316 million Americans were under a shelter-in-place or stay-at-home order.

With more than 1,000 deaths and nearly 100,000 cases, it was clear by April 2020 that COVID-19 was highly contagious and virulent. What wasn’t clear, even to public health officials, was how individuals could best protect themselves from COVID-19. In the early weeks of the outbreak, the CDC discouraged people from buying face masks, because officials feared a shortage of masks for doctors and hospital workers.

By April 2020, the CDC revised its recommendations, encouraging people to wear masks in public, to socially distance and to wash hands frequently. President Donald Trump undercut the CDC recommendations by emphasizing that masking was voluntary and vowing not to wear a mask himself. This was just the beginning of the political divisions that hobbled the COVID-19 response in America.

Global Financial Markets Collapse

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, with billions of people worldwide out of work, stuck at home, and fretting over shortages of essential items like toilet paper , global financial markets went into a tailspin.

In the United States, share prices on the New York Stock Exchange plummeted so quickly that the exchange had to shut down trading three separate times. The Dow Jones Industrial Average eventually lost 37 percent of its value, and the S&P 500 was down 34 percent.

Business closures and stay-at-home orders gutted the U.S. economy. The unemployment rate skyrocketed, particularly in the service sector (restaurant and other retail workers). By May 2020, the U.S. unemployment rate reached 14.7 percent, the highest jobless rate since the Great Depression . 

All across America, households felt the pinch of lost jobs and lower wages. Food insecurity reached a peak by December 2020 with 30 million American adults—a full 14 percent—reporting that their families didn’t get enough to eat in the past week.

The economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, like its health effects, weren’t experienced equally. Black, Hispanic and Native Americans suffered from unemployment and food insecurity at significantly higher rates than white Americans. 

Congress tried to avoid a complete economic collapse by authorizing a series of COVID-19 relief packages in 2020 and 2021, which included direct stimulus checks for all American families.

The Race for a Vaccine

A new vaccine typically takes 10 to 15 years to develop and test, but the world couldn’t wait that long for a COVID-19 vaccine. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the Trump administration launched “ Operation Warp Speed ,” a public-private partnership which provided billions of dollars in upfront funding to pharmaceutical companies to rapidly develop vaccines and conduct clinical trials.

The first clinical trial for a COVID-19 vaccine was announced on March 16, 2020, only days after the WHO officially classified COVID-19 as a pandemic. The vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer were the first ever to employ messenger RNA, a breakthrough technology. After large-scale clinical trials, both vaccines were found to be greater than 95 percent effective against infection with COVID-19.

A nurse from New York officially became the first American to receive a COVID-19 vaccine on December 14, 2020. Ten days later, more than 1 million vaccines had been administered, starting with healthcare workers and elderly residents of nursing homes. As the months rolled on, vaccine availability was expanded to all American adults, and then to teenagers and all school-age children.

By the end of the pandemic in early 2023, more than 670 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been administered in the United States at a rate of 203 doses per 100 people. Approximately 80 percent of the U.S. population received at least one COVID-19 shot, but vaccination rates were markedly lower among Black, Hispanic and Native Americans.

COVID-19 Deaths Heaviest Among Elderly and People of Color

In America, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted everyone’s lives, but those who died from the disease were far more likely to be older and people of color.

Of the more than 1.1 million COVID deaths in the United States, 75 percent were individuals who were 65 or older. A full 93 percent of American COVID-19 victims were 50 or older. Throughout the emergence of COVID-19 variants and the vaccine rollouts, older Americans remained the most at-risk for being hospitalized and ultimately dying from the disease.

Black, Hispanic and Native Americans were also at a statistically higher risk of developing life-threatening COVID-19 systems and succumbing to the disease. For example, Black and Hispanic Americans were twice as likely to be hospitalized from COVID-19 than white Americans. The COVID-19 pandemic shined light on the health disparities between racial and ethnic groups driven by systemic racism and lower access to healthcare.

Mental health also worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. The anxiety of contracting the disease, and the stresses of being unemployed or confined at home, led to unprecedented numbers of Americans reporting feelings of depression and suicidal ideation.

A Time of Social & Political Upheaval

In the United States, the three long years of the COVID-19 pandemic paralleled a time of heightened political contention and social upheaval.

When George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020, it sparked nationwide protests against police brutality and energized the Black Lives Matter movement. Because so many Americans were out of work or home from school due to COVID-19 shutdowns, unprecedented numbers of people from all walks of life took to the streets to demand reforms.

Instead of banding together to slow the spread of the disease, Americans became sharply divided along political lines in their opinions of masking requirements, vaccines and social distancing.

By March 2024, in signs that the pandemic was waning, the CDC issued new guidelines for people who were recovering from COVID-19. The agency said those infected with the virus no longer needed to remain isolated for five days after symptoms. And on March 10, 2024, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center stopped collecting data for its highly referenced COVID-19 dashboard.

Still, an estimated 17 percent of U.S. adults reported having experienced symptoms of long COVID, according to the Household Pulse Survey. The medical community is still working to understand the causes behind long COVID, which can afflict a patient for weeks, months or even years.

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“CDC Museum COVID Timeline.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . “Coronavirus: Timeline.” U.S. Department of Defense . “COVID-19 and Related Vaccine Development and Research.” Mayo Clinic . “COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by Race/Ethnicity: Current Data and Changes Over Time.” Kaiser Family Foundation . “Number of COVID-19 Deaths in the U.S. by Age.” Statista . “The Pandemic Deepened Fault Lines in American Society.” Scientific American . “Tracking the COVID-19 Economy’s Effects on Food, Housing, and Employment Hardships.” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities . “U.S. Confirmed Country’s First Case of COVID-19 3 Years Ago.” CNN .

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• Volume 5, Issue 7
• The COVID-19 pandemic: diverse contexts; different epidemics—how and why?
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• Wim Van Damme 1 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4773-5341 Ritwik Dahake 2 ,
• Alexandre Delamou 3 ,
• Brecht Ingelbeen 1 ,
• Edwin Wouters 4 , 5 ,
• Guido Vanham 6 , 7 ,
• Remco van de Pas 1 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1681-2604 Jean-Paul Dossou 1 , 8 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1294-3850 Seye Abimbola 10 , 11 ,
• Stefaan Van der Borght 12 ,
• Devadasan Narayanan 13 ,
• Gerald Bloom 14 ,
• Ian Van Engelgem 15 ,
• Mohamed Ali Ag Ahmed 16 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7000-3712 Joël Arthur Kiendrébéogo 1 , 17 , 18 ,
• Kristien Verdonck 1 ,
• Vincent De Brouwere 1 ,
• Kéfilath Bello 8 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5867-971X Helmut Kloos 19 ,
• Peter Aaby 20 ,
• Andreas Kalk 21 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2761-3566 Sameh Al-Awlaqi 22 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0968-0826 NS Prashanth 23 ,
• Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum 24 ,
• Placide Mbala 24 ,
• Steve Ahuka-Mundeke 24 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2393-1492 Yibeltal Assefa 25
• 1 Department of Public Health , Institute of Tropical Medicine , Antwerpen , Belgium
• 2 Independent Researcher , Bengaluru , India
• 3 Africa Centre of Excellence for Prevention and Control of Transmissible Diseases , Gamal Abdel Nasser University of Conakry , Conakry , Guinea
• 4 Department of Sociology and Centre for Population , University of Antwerp , Antwerpen , Belgium
• 5 Centre for Health Systems Research and Development , University of the Free State—Bloemfontein Campus , Bloemfontein , Free State , South Africa
• 6 Biomedical Department , Institute of Tropical Medicine , Antwerpen , Belgium
• 7 Biomedical Department , University of Antwerp , Antwerpen , Belgium
• 8 Public Health , Centre de recherche en Reproduction Humaine et en Démographie , Cotonou , Benin
• 9 National Institute of Public Health , Phnom Penh , Cambodia
• 10 School of Public Health , University of Sydney , Sydney , New South Wales , Australia
• 11 The George Institute for Global Health , Sydney , New South Wales , Australia
• 12 Board Member , Institute of Tropical Medicine , Antwerpen , Belgium
• 13 Health Systems Transformation Platform , New Delhi , India
• 14 Health and Nutrition Cluster , Institute of Development Studies , Brighton , UK
• 15 European Commission Directorate General for Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations , Kinshasa , Democratic Republic of Congo
• 16 University of Sherbrooke , Sherbrooke , Quebec , Canada
• 17 Public Health , University of Ouagadougou Health Sciences Training and Research Unit , Ouagadougou , Burkina Faso
• 18 Heidelberg Institute of Global Health, Medical Faculty and University Hospital , Heidelberg University , Heidelberg , Germany
• 19 Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics , University of California San Francisco , San Francisco , California , USA
• 20 INDEPTH Network , Bandim Health Project , Bissau , Guinea-Bissau
• 21 Bureau GIZ à Kinshasa , Kinshasa , Democratic Republic of Congo
• 22 Center for International Health Protection , Robert Koch Institute , Berlin , Germany
• 23 Health Equity Cluster , Institute of Public Health , Bengaluru , India
• 24 Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale , Kinshasa , Democratic Republic of Congo
• 25 School of Public Health , The University of Queensland , Brisbane , Queensland , Australia
• Correspondence to Professor Wim Van Damme; wvdamme{at}itg.be

It is very exceptional that a new disease becomes a true pandemic. Since its emergence in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19, has spread to nearly all countries of the world in only a few months. However, in different countries, the COVID-19 epidemic takes variable shapes and forms in how it affects communities. Until now, the insights gained on COVID-19 have been largely dominated by the COVID-19 epidemics and the lockdowns in China, Europe and the USA. But this variety of global trajectories is little described, analysed or understood. In only a few months, an enormous amount of scientific evidence on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 has been uncovered (knowns). But important knowledge gaps remain (unknowns). Learning from the variety of ways the COVID-19 epidemic is unfolding across the globe can potentially contribute to solving the COVID-19 puzzle. This paper tries to make sense of this variability—by exploring the important role that context plays in these different COVID-19 epidemics; by comparing COVID-19 epidemics with other respiratory diseases, including other coronaviruses that circulate continuously; and by highlighting the critical unknowns and uncertainties that remain. These unknowns and uncertainties require a deeper understanding of the variable trajectories of COVID-19. Unravelling them will be important for discerning potential future scenarios, such as the first wave in virgin territories still untouched by COVID-19 and for future waves elsewhere.

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This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See:  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ .

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2020-003098

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Summary box

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19, has spread to nearly all countries of the world in only a few months. It is unique that an emerging respiratory virus becomes a pandemic, and can continue human-to-human transmission unabated, probably permanently.

Depending on the context, the trajectory and the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic vary widely across affected countries. This is in fact the case with most infectious diseases.

Despite limited initial knowledge on COVID-19, most societies have deployed draconian measures, including lockdowns, to contain the virus and mitigate its impact. This had variable success, but invariably with profound socioeconomic collateral effects.

Through research and rapid sharing of its findings, progressively more insights on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 have been uncovered (knowns), mainly based on evidence from China, Europe and the USA; however, important knowledge gaps remain (unknowns).

The different COVID-19 epidemics and the responses unfolding in the Global South are little described, analysed or understood. Insights from these less researched contexts are important for discerning potential future scenarios, not only for the first wave in virgin territories still untouched by COVID-19, but also for future waves.

More understanding of lived experiences of people in a variety of contexts is necessary to get a full global picture and allow learning from this variety.

BMJ Global Health and Emerging Voices for Global Health have launched a call for such on-the-ground narratives and analyses on the epidemics of, and responses to, COVID-19.

Introduction

Late in 2019, a cluster of acute respiratory disease in Wuhan, China, was attributed to a new coronavirus, 1–3 later named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). 4 It was soon discovered that the virus is easily transmitted, can cause severe disease and can be quite lethal especially in the elderly and those with comorbidities. 5–8 The new human disease is called COVID-19. 9 Soon it became clear that its global spread was unstoppable. Even with draconian containment measures, such as strict movement restrictions, the so-called lockdown, it spread, and within a few months reached almost all countries and was declared a pandemic by the WHO. 10 Table 1 summarises key events in the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic, from December 2019 to May 2020.

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Key events in the COVID-19 pandemic, December 2019–May 2020

This progression is quite unique. New human pathogens emerge frequently from an animal host, but most cause only a local outbreak. Human-to-human transmission stops at some point, and the virus can only re-emerge as a human pathogen from its animal host. Only very rarely does an emerging pathogen become a pandemic. Over the past decades, a totally new pathogen emerged, caused serious disease, and spread around the globe continuously only once before: the HIV. It seems increasingly likely that SARS-CoV-2 transmission will be continuing. All countries are now facing their own ‘COVID-19 epidemic’.

In only a few months, the scientific community has started to learn the virus’s characteristics and its manifestations in different contexts. 11 But we fail to understand fully why the virus spreads at different speeds and affects populations differently. Our main objective is to make sense of those different expressions of the COVID-19 pandemic, to understand why COVID-19 follows variable trajectories in ways that are often quite different from the collective image created by the mediatisation of the dramatic COVID-19 epidemics in densely populated areas.

We start by exploring the role of context, followed by a brief summary of what is already known at the time of writing about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. We then compare these knowns with what is known of some other viral respiratory pathogens and identify the critical unknowns. We also discuss the coping strategies and collective strategies implemented to contain and mitigate the effect of the epidemic. We finally look ahead to potential future scenarios.

The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic: importance of context

Initially, human-to-human transmission was documented in family/friends clusters. 12–17 Progressively, it became clear that superspreading events, typically during social gatherings such as parties, religious services, weddings, sports events and carnival celebrations, have played an important role. 18–21 Dense transmission has also been documented in hospitals 22 and nursing homes possibly through aerosols. 23 24

SARS-CoV-2 has spread around the world through international travellers. The timing of the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 has largely depended on the intensity of connections with locations with ongoing COVID-19 epidemics; thus, it reached big urban centres first and, within these, often the most affluent groups. From there, the virus has spread at variable speeds to other population groups. 25 26

As of May 2020, the most explosive COVID-19 epidemics observed have been in densely populated areas in temperate climates in relatively affluent countries. 27 The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns have been covered intensively in the media and have shaped our collective image of the COVID-19 epidemic, both in the general public and in the scientific community.

The COVID-19 epidemic has spread more slowly and less intensively in rural areas, in Africa and the Indian subcontinent, and the rural areas of low and lower-middle income countries (LICs/LMICs). Not only the media but also the scientific community has paid much less attention to these realities, emerging later and spreading more slowly.

The dominant thinking has been that it is only a question of time before dramatic epidemics occur everywhere. This thinking, spread globally by international public health networks, has been substantiated by predictive mathematical models based largely on data from the epidemics of the Global North. However, what has been observed elsewhere is quite different although not necessarily less consequential. 28

The effects of the COVID-19 epidemic manifest in peculiar ways in each context. In the early stages of the COVID-19 epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa, the virus first affected the urban elites with international connections. From there, it was seeded to other sections of the society more slowly. In contrast, the collateral effects of a lockdown, even partial in many cases, are mostly felt by the urban poor, as ‘stay home’ orders abruptly intensify hardship for those earning their daily living in the informal urban economy. Governments of LICs/LMICs lack the budgetary space to grant generous benefit packages to counter the socioeconomic consequences. International agencies are very thinly spread, as the pandemic has been concurrent everywhere. Donor countries have focused mainly on their own COVID-19 epidemics.

The epidemic is thus playing out differently in different contexts. Many factors might explain SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics. Climate, population structure, social practices, pre-existing immunity and many other variables that have been explored are summarised in table 2 .

Contextual variables potentially influencing transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2

Although all these variables probably play some role, many uncertainties remain. It is difficult to assess how much these variables influence transmission in different contexts. It is even more difficult to assess how they interact and change over time and influence transmission among different social groups, resulting in the peculiar COVID-19 epidemic in any particular context.

Insights from other viruses

We do not attempt to give a complete overview of viruses but select only those viruses that emerged recently and caused epidemics such as Ebola, that have obvious similarities in transmission patterns such as influenza and measles, or that are closely related such as other coronaviruses.

Emerging viral respiratory pathogens

Respiratory viruses such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and avian influenza A and also Ebola have originated from animal hosts and caused human diseases ( table 3 ). These viruses do not continuously circulate from human to human. They create an outbreak only when there is interspecies cross-over transmission, most frequently from bats to another animal host.

Examples of emerging human respiratory viral diseases without sustained human-to-human transmission

The first human case of a disease from an emerging viral pathogen, the ‘index case’ or ‘patient zero’, is invariably someone in close contact with the originating animal host or an intermediary animal host. If this contact occurs in a remote rural community, the spread is usually slow, at low intensity, and could fade out before the pathogen gets a chance to spread to another community. The spread can suddenly intensify if seeded in a densely populated community, frequently in a particular context such as a hospital or during a social event, often referred to as a superspreading event. When the spread reaches a city, it can become a major outbreak, from where it can spread further; this happened with SARS-CoV in Hong Kong in 2003 and with Ebola in Conakry, Freetown and Monrovia in 2014–2016. 29 30 But at some stage human-to-human transmission is interrupted and the outbreak stops.

Only very exceptionally can a new viral pathogen sustain continuous human-to-human transmission. Other viral diseases such as measles and influenza are ‘old’ diseases; they have been studied in great depth. What can we learn from them?

Measles and influenza: the importance of context

It is thought that measles emerged thousands of years ago in the Middle East. It is assumed that a cross-over occurred from the rinderpest virus, 31 to become the human measles virus. Measles has since spread around the globe in continuous human-to-human transmission. When measles, along with other viruses such as smallpox and influenza, was introduced in the Americas by European conquerors, it contributed to a massive die-off of up to 90% of the original population. 32

The transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 can be compared with influenza. Influenza typically causes yearly epidemics in temperate climates during winter with less seasonal patterns in tropical or subtropical regions. 33 34 In hotter climates, such as in sub-Saharan Africa 33 or South and Southeast Asia, 34 it is transmitted year round, often not identified as influenza. Such different epidemic patterns of influenza are still incompletely understood but thought to be associated with temperature and humidity and human behavioural factors such as indoor crowding. 35

But, in contrast to SARS-CoV-2, the influenza virus is not new. Influenza is a very old disease, certainly circulating for several centuries. It has infected most human beings living on the planet already, many of them several times, leaving some immunity but no durable protection. The virus also mutates, giving rise to a new dominant strain every influenza season. Influenza is every year a slightly different virus (due to antigenic drift as a result of progressive mutations) with major differences every few decades (antigenic shift as a result of recombination with novel strains).

One such antigenic shift resulted in the 1918 H1N1 ‘Spanish’ Influenza pandemic, which had an estimated case fatality rate (CFR) of 2%–3%, killing millions. 36 Box 1 summarises some key facts about H1N1, including factors thought to be associated with its high CFR.

Pandemic H1N1 influenza, 1918–2009

The 1918 H1N1 virus probably infected one-third of the world’s population at that time (or ~500 million people). 84

The pandemic had three waves in quick succession; the second wave, in 1919, was worse than the first wave. 84

High mortality, especially in younger persons (5–15 years; ~25% of total deaths) in the 1918 pandemic, may have been due to antibody-dependent enhancement and ‘cytokine storms’. 84 Another possible explanation is that older persons had some protective cross-immunity from previous influenza outbreaks while younger persons did not.

H1N1 continued to circulate along with seasonal influenza viruses, often recombining to produce more severe local outbreaks, including other pandemics between 1918 and 2009, giving it the nickname ‘mother of all pandemics’.

The original 1918 H1N1 strain was replaced by A(H1N1)pdm09 virus that resulted from an antigenic shift and caused the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic.

The 2009 H1N1 virus originated in pigs in central Mexico in March 2009 and was responsible for an estimated 284 000 deaths worldwide with an estimated CFR<0.1%. 85 86

During the 2009 pandemic, mortality was much lower than in the 1918 pandemic. Higher mortality in persons younger than 65 years was related to cytokine storms. 87 A role of protective cross-immunity from previous influenza strains in older persons has been suggested.

After August 2010, the A(H1N1)pdm09 virus appeared to have integrated with circulating strains of influenza and continues to cause localised seasonal influenza outbreaks worldwide. 88

A major difference between COVID-19 and influenza is that SARS-CoV-2 is a new pathogen and influenza is not. At the time of writing (May 2020), SARS-CoV-2 has triggered an immune response in over 5 million confirmed infections (and probably in many more), definitely too few to create anything close to herd immunity. Calculations using an estimated reproductive number (R0) for SARS-CoV-2 suggest that herd immunity would require at least 60% of the population to have protective immunity (see box 2 ). 37

On the use of mathematical models during epidemics

 A dominant way of studying the transmission dynamics of an infectious disease such as COVID-19, and predicting the amplitude and peak of the epidemic in a population (city, province, country) and analysing the effect of control measures is using mathematical models. Based on available data and several assumptions, a model attempts to predict the course of the epidemic, the expected number of infections, clinical cases and deaths over time. Critical is the effective reproductive number (Rt). When Rt >1, the number of cases in a population increases; when Rt <1, the number of cases decreases. A relatively simple and widely used model is the susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered model, as used in the two papers recently published in BMJ Global Health on COVID-19 in Africa. 67 89 There are many more types of models, with varying degrees of complexity.

 The use of such models has strengths and limitations. Building a mathematical model implies trade-offs between accuracy, transparency, flexibility and timeliness. A difficulty, in general, is that the parameters on which the model is based, the so-called assumptions are frequently uncertain ( table 7 ) and predictions can vary widely if any of the parameters are modestly different. This uncertainty is captured in a sensitivity analysis, leading to various possible quantitative outcomes, usually expressed as a range of plausible possibilities, between ‘worst-case’ and ‘best-case’ scenarios.

 With a new disease such as COVID-19, certainly at the start of the outbreak, the parameters had to be based on very limited data from a particular context. However, many variables can widely differ across communities as they critically depend on contextual factors ( table 2 ). In mathematical models, all such uncertainties and unknowns are somehow hidden in the complex formulae of the model, as a quasi ‘black box’. Few people have the knowledge and skill to ‘open up the black box’.

 As uncertainties in COVID-19 are large, the range of possibilities produced by a model is wide, with the worst-case scenario typically predicting catastrophic numbers of cases and deaths. Such predictions are often misunderstood by journalists, practitioners and policy-makers, with worst-case estimates getting the most attention, 68 not specifying the huge uncertainties.

Knowns, uncertainties and unknowns about COVID-19, as of May 2020

Like COVID-19, measles and influenza have different epidemic patterns in different contexts. This also is the case for cholera, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and most infectious diseases. The difference in patterns is most pronounced and so is easily understood with vector-borne and water-borne diseases. Epidemic patterns are also different for air-borne infections, although they are less easily understood. Transmission of respiratory viruses is influenced by factors related to the virus and the human host but also by factors related to the natural and human environment ( table 4 ).

Factors related to transmission patterns and severity of respiratory viruses

However, we are quite unable to explain fully which factor has which influence, how these factors vary among different social groups and how interdependent or isolated they are. We are certainly unable to fully model all these variables mathematically to explain the epidemic pattern across a variety of different contexts. Too many variables and their interrelations are difficult to quantify, and when all these factors change over time while the pathogen continues to spread in diverse societies, the complexity becomes daunting.

Understanding transmission dynamics is a bit less daunting for measles, as several variables are well known and rather constant across individuals and contexts. The natural transmission pattern of measles, before the introduction of vaccines, has been well described. Measles is mostly a childhood disease, but this is not the case in very remote communities, where measles transmission had been interrupted for extended periods (such as the Faroe Islands). 38 39 Measles affected all age groups when reaching new territories, causing dramatic first-wave epidemics, a phenomenon called ‘virgin soil epidemic’. 40 41 The latest stages of the global dissemination of measles have been well documented, including in Australia, the Fiji islands and the Arctic countries, where such virgin soil epidemics occurred in the 19th and the mid-20th centuries. 32 42 Fortunately, measles infection creates robust protective immunity and after a first wave becomes a typical childhood disease, affecting only those without any prior immunity. 43 Human-to-human transmission of measles virus in a community stops when the virus cannot find new susceptible human hosts and the so-called herd immunity is reached. 44 45 But transmission of measles continues elsewhere on the planet from where it can be reintroduced a few years later when the population without protective immunity has grown large enough to allow human-to-human transmission again.

The epidemic patterns of measles are easily understood as measles is highly infectious, creates disease in almost every infected person and leaves lifelong natural immunity. Measles circulation, prior to vaccination, was continuous only in large urban areas with high birth rates. Everywhere else reintroduction occurred typically every 3–5 years but sometimes only after 10 or 15 years in isolated rural communities (such as among nomadic groups in the Sahel), causing epidemics among all those without acquired immunity and having lost maternal antibodies. 46 These diverse patterns of measles epidemics have been fundamentally changed by variable coverage of measles vaccination. They can still help us make sense of the diversity of COVID-19 epidemics being observed in 2020.

Measles illustrates convincingly that the transmission pattern of a respiratory virus is strongly influenced by the demographic composition, density and mixing pattern of the population and the connectedness to big urban centres. Measles transmission is continuous only in some large urban areas. It presents in short epidemics everywhere else with variable periodicity. This transmission pattern may well be a bit similar for COVID-19. But it took thousands of years for measles to reach all human communities while SARS-CoV-2 spread to all countries in only a few months, despite measles being much more transmissible than SARS-CoV-2. Factors such as increased air travel and more dense community structures play bigger roles for SARS-CoV-2 than they did for measles.

Comparison with other pathogenic coronaviruses

SARS-CoV-2 has many close relatives. Six other human coronaviruses (HCoVs) are known to infect humans. SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV (causing SARS and MERS, respectively) are very rare and do not continuously circulate among humans. The other four (HCoV-229E, HCoV-OC43, HCoV-HKU1 and HCoV-NL63) cause the common cold or diarrhoea and continuously circulate and mutate frequently. 47 48 They can cause disease in the same person repeatedly. The typical coronavirus remains localised to the epithelium of the upper respiratory tract, causes mild disease and elicits a poor immune response, hence the high rate of reinfection (in contrast to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, which go deeper into the lungs and hence are relatively less contagious). There is no cross-immunity between HCoV-229E and HCoV-OC43, and new strains arise continually by mutation selection. 49

Coping strategies and collective strategies

How a virus spreads and its disease progresses depend not only on the variables described above ( table 4 ) but also on the human reactions deployed when people are confronted with a disease outbreak or the threat of an outbreak. All these variables combined result in what unfolds as ‘the epidemic’ and the diverse ways it affects communities.

What a population experiences during an epidemic is not fully characterised by the numbers of known infections and deaths at the scale of a country. Such numbers hide regional and local differences, especially in large and diverse countries. The epidemic reaches the different geographical areas of a country at different moments and with different intensities. It affects different communities in variable ways, influencing how these communities perceive it and react to it. What constitutes a local COVID-19 epidemic is thus also characterised by the perceptions and the reactions it triggers in the different sections of the society.

Even before the virus reaches a community, the threat of an epidemic already causes fear, stress and anxiety. Consequently, the threat or arrival of the epidemic also triggers responses, early or late, with various degrees of intensity and effectiveness. The response to an epidemic can be divided into individual and household actions (coping strategies), and collectively organised strategies (collective strategies). Coping strategies are the actions people and families take when disease threatens and sickness occurs, including the ways they try to protect themselves from contagion. Collective strategies are voluntary or mandated measures deployed by organised communities and public authorities in response to an epidemic. These include, among others, isolation of the sick or the healthy, implementation of hygiene practices and physical distancing measures. They can also include mobility restrictions such as quarantine and cordon sanitaire . Coping strategies and collective strategies also include treatment of the sick, which critically depends on the availability and effectiveness of diagnostic and therapeutic tools, and performance of the health system. Collective strategies also include research being deployed to further scientific insight and the development of diagnostic and therapeutic tools, potentially including a vaccine.

Implementation of these measures depends not only on resources available but also on the understanding and interpretation of the disease by both the scientific community and the community at large, influenced by the information people receive from scientists, public authorities and the media. This information is interpreted within belief systems and influenced by rumours, increasingly so over social media, including waves of fake news, recently labelled ‘infodemics’. 50

Coping strategies and collective strategies start immediately, while there are still many unknowns and uncertainties. Progressively, as the pandemic unfolds and scientists interpret observations in the laboratory, in the clinic, and in society, more insights are gained and inform the response.

Table 5 lists measures recommended by the WHO for preventing transmission and slowing down the COVID-19 epidemic. 51–53 ‘Lockdown’ first employed in early 2020 in Wuhan, China, is the label often given to the bundle of containment and mitigation measures promoted or imposed by public authorities, although the specific measures may vary greatly between countries. In China, lockdown was very strictly applied and enforced. It clearly had an impact, resulting in total interruption of transmission locally. 54 55

Measures recommended by the WHO for preventing transmission and slowing down the COVID-19 epidemic, 2020

This list or catalogue of measures is quite comprehensive; it includes all measures that at first sight seem to reduce transmission opportunities for a respiratory virus. However, knowledge is lacking about the effectiveness of each measure in different contexts. As a global health agency, the WHO recommends a ‘generic catalogue’ of measures from which all countries can select an appropriate mix at any one time depending on the phase of the epidemic, categorised in four transmission scenarios (no cases, first cases, first clusters, and community transmission). 52 However, under pressure to act and with little time to consider variable options, public authorities often adopted as ‘blueprint’ with limited consideration for the socioeconomic context. 53 56

The initial lockdown in China thus much inspired the collective strategies elsewhere. This has been referred to as ‘global mimicry’, 57 : the response is somehow partly ‘copy/paste’ from measures observed previously (strong path dependency).

Some epidemiologists in Northern Europe (including the UK, 58 Sweden 59 and the Netherlands 60 ) pleaded against strict containment measures and proposed that building up herd immunity against SARS-CoV-2 might be wiser. Towards early April 2020, it became increasingly clear that reaching herd immunity in the short term was illusive. Most countries thus backed off from the herd immunity approach to combating COVID-19 and implemented lockdowns. 61 The intensity of the lockdowns has been variable, ranging from very strict (‘Chinese, Wuhan style’), over intermediary (‘French/Italian/New York City style’ and ‘Hong Kong style’), to relaxed (‘Swedish style’), or piecemeal.

The effectiveness of lockdowns largely depends on at what stage of the epidemic they are started, and how intensively they are applied. This is quite variable across countries, depending on the understanding and motivation of the population and their perceived risk (‘willingness to adhere’), on the trust they have in government advice (‘willingness to comply’), and on the degree of enforcement by public authorities. The feasibility for different population groups to follow these measures depends largely on their socioeconomic and living conditions. It is obviously more difficult for people living in crowded shacks in urban slums to practise physical distancing measures and strict hand hygiene when water is scarce than for people living in wealthier parts of a city.

Collateral effects of the response

Every intervention against the COVID-19 epidemic has a certain degree of effect and comes at a cost with collateral effects. Each collective strategy (1) has intended and unintended consequences (some are more or less desirable); (2) is more or less feasible and/or acceptable in a given context and for certain subgroups in that society; (3) has a cost, not only in financial terms but in many other ways, such as restrictions on movement and behaviour, stress, uncertainty and others. These costs are more or less acceptable, depending on the perception of the risk and many societal factors; (4) can be implemented with more or less intensity; and (5) can be enforced more or less vigorously.

The balance between benefit and cost is crucial in judging whether measures are appropriate, which is very context specific. Furthermore, benefits and costs are also related to the positionality from which they are analysed: benefits for whom and costs borne by whom? More wealthy societies with strong social safety nets can afford increased temporary unemployment. This is much more consequential in poorer countries, where large proportions of the population live precarious lives and where public authorities cannot implement generous mitigation measures at scale.

The adherence to hygiene and distancing measures depends not only on living conditions but also on risk perception and cultural norms. Mass masking has been readily accepted in some Asian countries, where it was already broadly practised even before the COVID-19 epidemic. It remains more controversial in Western societies, some of which even have legal bans on veiling in public places.

Lockdowns are unprecedented and have triggered intensive public debate. Not surprisingly, the impact of lighter lockdowns on the transmission is much less impressive; they decrease transmission but do not stop it. Quite rapidly, the justification for lockdowns shifted from stopping transmission to ‘flattening the curve’. Also, once a lockdown is started, rationalised, explained and enforced, it is difficult to decide when to stop it. Exit scenarios, usually some form of progressive relaxation, are implemented with the knowledge that transmission will be facilitated again. 62

Knowns and unknowns about SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19

What we already know.

The available information on SARS-CoV-2 and the spectrum of COVID-19 disease is summarised in tables 6 and 7 . It is increasingly becoming clear that most transmission happens indoors and that superspreading events trigger intensive dissemination.

Knowns, uncertainties and unknowns about severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), as of May 2020

Relationship between the dose of the initial infectious inoculum, transmission dynamics and severity of the COVID-19 disease

Hypothesis:

The dose of the virus in the initial inoculum may be a missing link between the variation observed in the transmission dynamics and the spectrum of the COVID-19 disease. It is plausible that:

Viral dose in inoculum is related to severity of disease.

Severity of disease is related to viral shedding and transmission potential.

This hypothesis plays out potentially at three levels:

At individual level: a person infected with a small dose of viral inoculum will on average develop milder disease than a person infected with a high viral inoculum and vice versa.

At cluster level: a person with asymptomatic infection or mild disease will on average spread lower doses of virus in droplets and aerosols and is less likely to transmit disease; when the person transmits, the newly infected person is more likely to have milder disease than if infected by a severely ill person, who spreads on an average higher doses of virus. This causes clusters and chains of milder cases or of more severe cases.

At community level: in certain contexts, such as dense urban centres in moderate climates during the season when people live mostly indoors, the potential for intensive transmission and explosive outbreaks is high, especially during indoor superspreading events. In other contexts, such as in rural areas or in regions with hot and humid climate where people live mostly outdoors, intensive transmission and explosive outbreaks are less likely.

The virology and immunology of SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 are being studied intensively. This is critical not only to understand what will potentially happen in future waves but also for the development of a vaccine. Some scientists and companies are very upbeat about the possibility of producing a vaccine in record time. Having a vaccine is one thing, but how effective it is, is quite another. As acquired immunity after a natural infection is probably not very robust ( table 6 ), it will also be challenging to trigger robust immunity with a vaccine, but perhaps it is not impossible. Many questions remain, some of which are summarised in table 8 .

Questions and considerations in case a COVID-19 vaccine is developed

Regarding the severity of COVID-19, initial fears of very high mortality have also lessened. It has progressively become clear that many infections remain asymptomatic, that severe disease is rare in children and young adults, and that mortality is heavily concentrated in the very old and those with comorbidities. Table 7 summarises a fuller overview of the present state of knowledge regarding COVID-19.

With COVID-19 epidemics unfolding rapidly, several of the variables in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and the disease spectrum of COVID-19 could be quantified. This allows for mathematical modelling. Several models have been quickly developed, leading to predictions of the speed of transmission and the burden of COVID-19 ( box 2 ). Predictive models developed by the Imperial College 63 ; the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy and Johns Hopkins University 28 ; the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation 64 ; Harvard University 65 ; and the WHO, 66 including an ‘African model’, 67 are a few that are influencing containment strategies around the world.

Critical unknowns and uncertainties

Although the COVID-19 pandemic triggered unprecedented research efforts globally, with over 30 000 scientific papers published between January and April 2020, there are still critical unknowns and many uncertainties.

Tables 6 and 7 summarise many of the knowns, but their relative importance or weight is not clear. For instance, the virus can spread via droplets, hands, aerosols, fomites and possibly through the environment. However, the relative importance of these in various contexts is much less clear. These factors undoubtedly vary between settings, whether in hospitals, in elderly homes, or at mass events. The weight of the variables also probably differs between the seeding and initial spread in a community and the spread when it suddenly amplifies and intensifies. The importance of each variable probably also depends on climatic conditions, not only outdoors, but also on microclimates indoors, influenced by ventilation and air conditioning and built environments.

We summarise the critical unknowns in table 9 along some elements to consider in addressing the unknowns and thoughts on their importance.

Some critical unknowns in SARS-CoV-2 transmission

Uncertainty remains, leading to controversy and directly influencing the choice of containment measures. Controversy continues regarding when and where lockdown or more selective measures are equally effective with lower societal effects.

New evidence is being discovered rapidly. Some evidence comes from field observations and ecological studies; other evidence results from scientific experiments or observations in the laboratory and the clinic. Sense-making by combining insights from different observations and through the lens of various disciplines can lead to hypotheses that can be tested and verified or refuted. One such hypothesis is that there is a relationship between the dose of virus in the infectious inoculum and the severity of COVID-19 disease. Several intriguing observations in the current pandemic could be (partially) explained by such a relationship. We develop this hypothesis in box 3 , as an example of possible further research, to create new insight which may influence control strategies.

This viral inoculum theory is consistent with many observations from the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is not easy to test scientifically.

Potential future scenarios of COVID-19

As COVID-19 is a new disease, we should make a distinction between (1) the current 2019–2020 ‘virgin soil pandemic’ caused by SARS-CoV-2, specifically in how it will further spread around the globe in the first wave, and (2) the potential future transmission in subsequent waves. In some countries, transmission will continue at lower levels. In other countries, such as China, the virus may have been eliminated but can be reintroduced in identical or mutated form.

For the current first wave, using influenza and the common cold as reasonable comparisons, it is possible that the major epidemics, as witnessed in Wuhan, northern Italy, or New York, will typically occur in temperate climates in the winter season. Some predict that such epidemics will last between 8 and 10 weeks (but this is just a plausible and reasonable comparison in analogy with seasonal influenza). It is possible that in hotter climates the transmission may become continuous, year round at lower levels. It is increasingly clear that hot climate does not exclude superspreading events as observed in Guayaquil, Ecuador and in various cities in Brazil. Ventilation, air-conditioning and crowded places may still create favourable environments for intensive transmission. It is also quite possible that the more difficult spread of SARS-CoV-2 in such climates may, in certain communities, be compensated for by human factors such as higher population density, closer human contacts and lesser hygiene (as, for instance, exist in urban slums in mega cities in low income countries). How all this plays out in sub-Saharan Africa, in its slums and remote areas, is still largely unknown. With SARS-CoV-2, transmission scenarios are mainly based on mathematical models despite their serious limitations ( box 2 ).

As the virus continues to circulate, it will progressively be less of a ‘new disease’ during subsequent waves. The immunity caused by the first epidemic will influence how the virus spreads and causes disease. Whether later waves will become progressively milder or worse, as observed in the 1918–19 Spanish influenza, is a matter of intense speculation. Both views seem plausible and the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Indeed, immunity should be defined on two levels: individual immunity and herd immunity. Individual immunity will dictate how mild or severe the disease will be in subsequent infections. Herd immunity could be defined in different communities/regions/countries that, in theory, could be fenced off, allowing only limited interaction with other areas, impacting the spread of the virus to more vulnerable populations.

The future is unknown, but we can think of likely futures and critical elements therein.

Some obvious critical elements are:

Will there be an effective vaccine? How soon? How effective? How available at scale? How acceptable?

Will there be an effective treatment? How soon? How effective? How available at scale?

The current first wave is unfolding in the absence of effective biomedical tools (no vaccine, no effective antiviral or immune-modulating medicine, only supportive treatment such as oxygen therapy). This comes close to what can be called a ‘natural evolution’ of the COVID-19 pandemic, mostly modified by the containment measures deployed ( table 5 ) and the effect of supportive treatment.

Progressively, we can learn more about the direct health effects of COVID-19 (morbidity and mortality), about appropriate individual and collective measures, 68 the various degrees of societal disruption and the collateral effects on other essential health services (eg, reluctance to use health services for other health problems, because of ‘corona fear’). Our growing knowledge may enable us to progressively improve our response.

Learning from the variety of ways the COVID-19 epidemic is unfolding across the globe provides important ‘ecological evidence’ and creates insights into its epidemiology and impacts. Until now, the insights gained on COVID-19 have been largely dominated by the COVID-19 epidemics in the Global North. More understanding of lived experiences of people in a variety of contexts, where the epidemic is spreading more slowly and with different impacts, is necessary to get a full global picture and allow learning from this variety. This is an important missing piece of the COVID-19 puzzle.

BMJ Global Health and Emerging Voices for Global Health have launched a call ( https://blogs.bmj.com/bmjgh/2020/05/26/from-models-to-narratives-and-back-a-call-for-on-the-ground-analyses-of-covid-19-spread-and-response-in-africa/ ) for such on-the-ground narratives and analyses of the spread of and response to COVID-19, local narratives and analyses that will hopefully help to further enrich our understanding of how and why the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold in multiple local epidemics along diverse trajectories around the globe.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Johan Leeuwenburg, Piet Kager, and Luc Bonneux for useful comments on a previous draft, the teams of the Riposte corona, INRB, Kinshasa and the Belgian Embassy in Kinshasa for welcoming and hosting WVD during his unscheduled extended stay in Kinshasa during the lockdown, March–June 2020. We are thankful to Mrs. Ann Byers for editing the manuscript at short notice.

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Twitter @Ingelbeen, @jdossou80, @seyeabimbola, @jarthurk, @@vdbrouwere, @SamehAlawlaqi, @prashanthns

Contributors WVD, RD, EW and YA conceived and designed the study. RD, GV, YA and WVD searched the literature and screened for new emerging evidence. WVD, RD and YA drafted successive versions of the manuscript and coordinated inputs from all coauthors. YA, SA, KV, BI, RvdP and HK contributed to writing the manuscript. AD, J-PD, PI, SVdB, DN, GB, IVE, MAAA, JAK, VDB, KB, PA, AK, SA-A, NSP, J-JM-T, PM and SA-M reviewed successive versions of the manuscript and oriented it, with a field-based and local gaze from Guinea, Benin, Cambodia, Belgium, India, the UK, Mali, Canada, Burkina Faso, Germany, the USA, Guinea-Bissau, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen and Australia. All authors commented on subsequent versions of the manuscript and approved the final version. WVD attests that all listed authors meet authorship criteria and that no others meeting the criteria have been omitted.

Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing interests None declared.

Patient consent for publication Not required.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Data availability statement No additional data are available.

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How to Write About Coronavirus in a College Essay

Students can share how they navigated life during the coronavirus pandemic in a full-length essay or an optional supplement.

Writing About COVID-19 in College Essays

Getty Images

Experts say students should be honest and not limit themselves to merely their experiences with the pandemic.

The global impact of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, means colleges and prospective students alike are in for an admissions cycle like no other. Both face unprecedented challenges and questions as they grapple with their respective futures amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic.

Colleges must examine applicants without the aid of standardized test scores for many – a factor that prompted many schools to go test-optional for now . Even grades, a significant component of a college application, may be hard to interpret with some high schools adopting pass-fail classes last spring due to the pandemic. Major college admissions factors are suddenly skewed.

"I can't help but think other (admissions) factors are going to matter more," says Ethan Sawyer, founder of the College Essay Guy, a website that offers free and paid essay-writing resources.

College essays and letters of recommendation , Sawyer says, are likely to carry more weight than ever in this admissions cycle. And many essays will likely focus on how the pandemic shaped students' lives throughout an often tumultuous 2020.

But before writing a college essay focused on the coronavirus, students should explore whether it's the best topic for them.

Writing About COVID-19 for a College Application

Much of daily life has been colored by the coronavirus. Virtual learning is the norm at many colleges and high schools, many extracurriculars have vanished and social lives have stalled for students complying with measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.

"For some young people, the pandemic took away what they envisioned as their senior year," says Robert Alexander, dean of admissions, financial aid and enrollment management at the University of Rochester in New York. "Maybe that's a spot on a varsity athletic team or the lead role in the fall play. And it's OK for them to mourn what should have been and what they feel like they lost, but more important is how are they making the most of the opportunities they do have?"

That question, Alexander says, is what colleges want answered if students choose to address COVID-19 in their college essay.

But the question of whether a student should write about the coronavirus is tricky. The answer depends largely on the student.

"In general, I don't think students should write about COVID-19 in their main personal statement for their application," Robin Miller, master college admissions counselor at IvyWise, a college counseling company, wrote in an email.

"Certainly, there may be exceptions to this based on a student's individual experience, but since the personal essay is the main place in the application where the student can really allow their voice to be heard and share insight into who they are as an individual, there are likely many other topics they can choose to write about that are more distinctive and unique than COVID-19," Miller says.

Opinions among admissions experts vary on whether to write about the likely popular topic of the pandemic.

"If your essay communicates something positive, unique, and compelling about you in an interesting and eloquent way, go for it," Carolyn Pippen, principal college admissions counselor at IvyWise, wrote in an email. She adds that students shouldn't be dissuaded from writing about a topic merely because it's common, noting that "topics are bound to repeat, no matter how hard we try to avoid it."

Above all, she urges honesty.

"If your experience within the context of the pandemic has been truly unique, then write about that experience, and the standing out will take care of itself," Pippen says. "If your experience has been generally the same as most other students in your context, then trying to find a unique angle can easily cross the line into exploiting a tragedy, or at least appearing as though you have."

But focusing entirely on the pandemic can limit a student to a single story and narrow who they are in an application, Sawyer says. "There are so many wonderful possibilities for what you can say about yourself outside of your experience within the pandemic."

He notes that passions, strengths, career interests and personal identity are among the multitude of essay topic options available to applicants and encourages them to probe their values to help determine the topic that matters most to them – and write about it.

That doesn't mean the pandemic experience has to be ignored if applicants feel the need to write about it.

Writing About Coronavirus in Main and Supplemental Essays

Students can choose to write a full-length college essay on the coronavirus or summarize their experience in a shorter form.

To help students explain how the pandemic affected them, The Common App has added an optional section to address this topic. Applicants have 250 words to describe their pandemic experience and the personal and academic impact of COVID-19.

"That's not a trick question, and there's no right or wrong answer," Alexander says. Colleges want to know, he adds, how students navigated the pandemic, how they prioritized their time, what responsibilities they took on and what they learned along the way.

If students can distill all of the above information into 250 words, there's likely no need to write about it in a full-length college essay, experts say. And applicants whose lives were not heavily altered by the pandemic may even choose to skip the optional COVID-19 question.

"This space is best used to discuss hardship and/or significant challenges that the student and/or the student's family experienced as a result of COVID-19 and how they have responded to those difficulties," Miller notes. Using the section to acknowledge a lack of impact, she adds, "could be perceived as trite and lacking insight, despite the good intentions of the applicant."

To guard against this lack of awareness, Sawyer encourages students to tap someone they trust to review their writing , whether it's the 250-word Common App response or the full-length essay.

Experts tend to agree that the short-form approach to this as an essay topic works better, but there are exceptions. And if a student does have a coronavirus story that he or she feels must be told, Alexander encourages the writer to be authentic in the essay.

"My advice for an essay about COVID-19 is the same as my advice about an essay for any topic – and that is, don't write what you think we want to read or hear," Alexander says. "Write what really changed you and that story that now is yours and yours alone to tell."

Sawyer urges students to ask themselves, "What's the sentence that only I can write?" He also encourages students to remember that the pandemic is only a chapter of their lives and not the whole book.

Miller, who cautions against writing a full-length essay on the coronavirus, says that if students choose to do so they should have a conversation with their high school counselor about whether that's the right move. And if students choose to proceed with COVID-19 as a topic, she says they need to be clear, detailed and insightful about what they learned and how they adapted along the way.

"Approaching the essay in this manner will provide important balance while demonstrating personal growth and vulnerability," Miller says.

Pippen encourages students to remember that they are in an unprecedented time for college admissions.

"It is important to keep in mind with all of these (admission) factors that no colleges have ever had to consider them this way in the selection process, if at all," Pippen says. "They have had very little time to calibrate their evaluations of different application components within their offices, let alone across institutions. This means that colleges will all be handling the admissions process a little bit differently, and their approaches may even evolve over the course of the admissions cycle."

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COVID-19 Was a Turning Point for Health

Our new book focuses on the lessons of the pandemic..

Posted February 15, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• To think comprehensively about COVID-19 is to think not just about the past but also about the future.
• The narratives we accept about the pandemic will do much to shape our ability to create a healthier world.
• Understanding the pandemic, and learning from it, means coming to terms with the emotions of that time.

In 2021, the United States was at a turning point. We had just lived through the acute phase of a global pandemic. During that time, the country had experienced an economic crisis, civil unrest, a deeply divisive federal election, and a technological revolution in how we live, work, and congregate. The emergence of COVID-19 vaccines allowed us, finally, to look ahead to a post-pandemic world, but what would that world be like? Would it be a return to the pre-COVID-19 status quo, or would it be something radically new?

It was with these questions in mind that, in 2021, I partnered with my colleague Michael Stein to write a series of essays reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic. Our aim was to engage with the COVID moment through the lens of cutting -edge public health science. By exploring the pandemic’s intersection with topics like digital surveillance, vaccine distribution, big data, and the link between science and political decision-making , we tried to sketch what the moment meant while it unfolded and what its implications might be for the future. If journalism is “the first rough draft of history,” these essays were, in a way, our effort to produce just such a draft, from the perspective of a forward-looking public health. I am delighted to announce that a book based on this series of essays has just been published by Oxford University Press: The Turning Point: Reflections on a Pandemic .

The book includes a series of short chapters, structured in five sections that address the following themes:

This section looks at the COVID-19 moment through the lens of what we might learn from it, toward better addressing future pandemics. It tackles challenges we faced in our approach to testing, our successes and shortcomings in implementing contact tracing, the intersection of the pandemic and mass incarceration, and more. Many of these lessons emerged organically from the day-to-day experience of the pandemic, reflecting “unknown unknowns”—areas where we encountered unexpected deficits in our knowledge, which were revealed by the circumstances of the pandemic. Chapter 8, for example, explores the necessity of public health officials speaking with care, mindful that our words may be used to justify authoritarian approaches in the name of health, a challenge we saw in the actions of the Chinese government during the pandemic.

Our understanding of large-scale health challenges like pandemics depends on more than collections of data and a timeline of events. It depends on our stories. The narratives we accept about the pandemic will do much to shape our ability to create a healthier world before the next contagion strikes. This section explores the stories we told during COVID-19 about what was happening to us and looks ahead to the narratives that will likely define our recollections of the pandemic moment. It addresses narratives around the virtues and limits of expertise, the role of the media as both a shaper of stories and a character in them, the hotly contested narrative around vaccines, and the role scientists, physicians, and epidemiologists played in shaping the story of the pandemic as it unfolded.

This section explores how our values informed what we did during COVID-19 through the ethical considerations that shaped our engagement with the moment. These include the ethical tradeoffs involved in questions of digital surveillance, scientific bias, vaccine mandates, balancing individual autonomy and collective responsibility, and the role of the profit motive in creating critical treatments. At times, these reflections reach back into history, grappling with past moments when we failed in our ethical obligations to support the health of all, as in a chapter discussing how the legacy of medical racism shaped our engagement with communities of color during the pandemic. Such soul-searching is core to our ability to evaluate our performance during COVID-19 and face the future grounded in the values that support effective, ethical public health action.

As human beings, we do not process events through reason alone. We are deeply swayed by emotion . This is particularly true in times of tragedy like COVID-19. Understanding the pandemic, and learning from it, means coming to terms with the emotions of that time, the feelings that attended all we did. Grief and loss, humility and hope, trust and mistrust , compassion and fear —both individual and collective—were all core to the experience of the pandemic. The simple act of recognizing our collective grief, as several chapters in this section try to do, can help us move forward, acknowledging the emotions that attend tragedy as we work toward a better world.

To think comprehensively about COVID-19 is to think not just about the past but about the future. We seek to understand the pandemic to prevent something like it from ever happening again. This means creating a world that is fundamentally healthier than the one that existed in 2019. This final section looks to the future from the perspective of the COVID-19 moment, with an eye toward using the lessons of that time to create a healthier world, as in Chapter 50, which addresses the challenge of rebuilding trust in public health institutions after it was tested during the pandemic. The section also touches on leadership and decision-making, shaping a better health system, shoring up our investment in health, the future of remote work, and next steps in our efforts to support health in the years to come.

I end with a note of gratitude to Michael Stein, who led on the development of this book. It is, as always, a privilege to work with him and learn from him. I look forward to continued collaborations in the months and years to come, and to hearing from readers of The Turning Point as we engage in our collective task of building a healthier world, informed by what we have lived through and looking to the future.

A version of this essay appeared on Substack.

Sandro Galea, M.D., is the Robert A. Knox professor and dean of the Boston University School of Public Health

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Covid 19 Essay in English

Essay on Covid -19: In a very short amount of time, coronavirus has spread globally. It has had an enormous impact on people's lives, economy, and societies all around the world, affecting every country. Governments have had to take severe measures to try and contain the pandemic. The virus has altered our way of life in many ways, including its effects on our health and our economy. Here are a few sample essays on ‘CoronaVirus’.

100 Words Essay on Covid 19

200 words essay on covid 19, 500 words essay on covid 19.

COVID-19 or Corona Virus is a novel coronavirus that was first identified in 2019. It is similar to other coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, but it is more contagious and has caused more severe respiratory illness in people who have been infected. The novel coronavirus became a global pandemic in a very short period of time. It has affected lives, economies and societies across the world, leaving no country untouched. The virus has caused governments to take drastic measures to try and contain it. From health implications to economic and social ramifications, COVID-19 impacted every part of our lives. It has been more than 2 years since the pandemic hit and the world is still recovering from its effects.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the world has been impacted in a number of ways. For one, the global economy has taken a hit as businesses have been forced to close their doors. This has led to widespread job losses and an increase in poverty levels around the world. Additionally, countries have had to impose strict travel restrictions in an attempt to contain the virus, which has resulted in a decrease in tourism and international trade. Furthermore, the pandemic has put immense pressure on healthcare systems globally, as hospitals have been overwhelmed with patients suffering from the virus. Lastly, the outbreak has led to a general feeling of anxiety and uncertainty, as people are fearful of contracting the disease.

My Experience of COVID-19

I still remember how abruptly colleges and schools shut down in March 2020. I was a college student at that time and I was under the impression that everything would go back to normal in a few weeks. I could not have been more wrong. The situation only got worse every week and the government had to impose a lockdown. There were so many restrictions in place. For example, we had to wear face masks whenever we left the house, and we could only go out for essential errands. Restaurants and shops were only allowed to operate at take-out capacity, and many businesses were shut down.

In the current scenario, coronavirus is dominating all aspects of our lives. The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc upon people’s lives, altering the way we live and work in a very short amount of time. It has revolutionised how we think about health care, education, and even social interaction. This virus has had long-term implications on our society, including its impact on mental health, economic stability, and global politics. But we as individuals can help to mitigate these effects by taking personal responsibility to protect themselves and those around them from infection.

Effects of CoronaVirus on Education

The outbreak of coronavirus has had a significant impact on education systems around the world. In China, where the virus originated, all schools and universities were closed for several weeks in an effort to contain the spread of the disease. Many other countries have followed suit, either closing schools altogether or suspending classes for a period of time.

This has resulted in a major disruption to the education of millions of students. Some have been able to continue their studies online, but many have not had access to the internet or have not been able to afford the costs associated with it. This has led to a widening of the digital divide between those who can afford to continue their education online and those who cannot.

The closure of schools has also had a negative impact on the mental health of many students. With no face-to-face contact with friends and teachers, some students have felt isolated and anxious. This has been compounded by the worry and uncertainty surrounding the virus itself.

The situation with coronavirus has improved and schools have been reopened but students are still catching up with the gap of 2 years that the pandemic created. In the meantime, governments and educational institutions are working together to find ways to support students and ensure that they are able to continue their education despite these difficult circumstances.

Effects of CoronaVirus on Economy

The outbreak of the coronavirus has had a significant impact on the global economy. The virus, which originated in China, has spread to over two hundred countries, resulting in widespread panic and a decrease in global trade. As a result of the outbreak, many businesses have been forced to close their doors, leading to a rise in unemployment. In addition, the stock market has taken a severe hit.

Effects of CoronaVirus on Health

The effects that coronavirus has on one's health are still being studied and researched as the virus continues to spread throughout the world. However, some of the potential effects on health that have been observed thus far include respiratory problems, fever, and coughing. In severe cases, pneumonia, kidney failure, and death can occur. It is important for people who think they may have been exposed to the virus to seek medical attention immediately so that they can be treated properly and avoid any serious complications. There is no specific cure or treatment for coronavirus at this time, but there are ways to help ease symptoms and prevent the virus from spreading.

Explore Career Options (By Industry)

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Data Administrator

Database professionals use software to store and organise data such as financial information, and customer shipping records. Individuals who opt for a career as data administrators ensure that data is available for users and secured from unauthorised sales. DB administrators may work in various types of industries. It may involve computer systems design, service firms, insurance companies, banks and hospitals.

Bio Medical Engineer

The field of biomedical engineering opens up a universe of expert chances. An Individual in the biomedical engineering career path work in the field of engineering as well as medicine, in order to find out solutions to common problems of the two fields. The biomedical engineering job opportunities are to collaborate with doctors and researchers to develop medical systems, equipment, or devices that can solve clinical problems. Here we will be discussing jobs after biomedical engineering, how to get a job in biomedical engineering, biomedical engineering scope, and salary. 

Ethical Hacker

A career as ethical hacker involves various challenges and provides lucrative opportunities in the digital era where every giant business and startup owns its cyberspace on the world wide web. Individuals in the ethical hacker career path try to find the vulnerabilities in the cyber system to get its authority. If he or she succeeds in it then he or she gets its illegal authority. Individuals in the ethical hacker career path then steal information or delete the file that could affect the business, functioning, or services of the organization.

GIS officer work on various GIS software to conduct a study and gather spatial and non-spatial information. GIS experts update the GIS data and maintain it. The databases include aerial or satellite imagery, latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, and manually digitized images of maps. In a career as GIS expert, one is responsible for creating online and mobile maps.

Data Analyst

The invention of the database has given fresh breath to the people involved in the data analytics career path. Analysis refers to splitting up a whole into its individual components for individual analysis. Data analysis is a method through which raw data are processed and transformed into information that would be beneficial for user strategic thinking.

Data are collected and examined to respond to questions, evaluate hypotheses or contradict theories. It is a tool for analyzing, transforming, modeling, and arranging data with useful knowledge, to assist in decision-making and methods, encompassing various strategies, and is used in different fields of business, research, and social science.

Geothermal Engineer

Individuals who opt for a career as geothermal engineers are the professionals involved in the processing of geothermal energy. The responsibilities of geothermal engineers may vary depending on the workplace location. Those who work in fields design facilities to process and distribute geothermal energy. They oversee the functioning of machinery used in the field.

Database Architect

If you are intrigued by the programming world and are interested in developing communications networks then a career as database architect may be a good option for you. Data architect roles and responsibilities include building design models for data communication networks. Wide Area Networks (WANs), local area networks (LANs), and intranets are included in the database networks. It is expected that database architects will have in-depth knowledge of a company's business to develop a network to fulfil the requirements of the organisation. Stay tuned as we look at the larger picture and give you more information on what is db architecture, why you should pursue database architecture, what to expect from such a degree and what your job opportunities will be after graduation. Here, we will be discussing how to become a data architect. Students can visit NIT Trichy , IIT Kharagpur , JMI New Delhi . 

Remote Sensing Technician

Individuals who opt for a career as a remote sensing technician possess unique personalities. Remote sensing analysts seem to be rational human beings, they are strong, independent, persistent, sincere, realistic and resourceful. Some of them are analytical as well, which means they are intelligent, introspective and inquisitive. 

Remote sensing scientists use remote sensing technology to support scientists in fields such as community planning, flight planning or the management of natural resources. Analysing data collected from aircraft, satellites or ground-based platforms using statistical analysis software, image analysis software or Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a significant part of their work. Do you want to learn how to become remote sensing technician? There's no need to be concerned; we've devised a simple remote sensing technician career path for you. Scroll through the pages and read.

Budget Analyst

Budget analysis, in a nutshell, entails thoroughly analyzing the details of a financial budget. The budget analysis aims to better understand and manage revenue. Budget analysts assist in the achievement of financial targets, the preservation of profitability, and the pursuit of long-term growth for a business. Budget analysts generally have a bachelor's degree in accounting, finance, economics, or a closely related field. Knowledge of Financial Management is of prime importance in this career.

Underwriter

An underwriter is a person who assesses and evaluates the risk of insurance in his or her field like mortgage, loan, health policy, investment, and so on and so forth. The underwriter career path does involve risks as analysing the risks means finding out if there is a way for the insurance underwriter jobs to recover the money from its clients. If the risk turns out to be too much for the company then in the future it is an underwriter who will be held accountable for it. Therefore, one must carry out his or her job with a lot of attention and diligence.

Finance Executive

Product manager.

A Product Manager is a professional responsible for product planning and marketing. He or she manages the product throughout the Product Life Cycle, gathering and prioritising the product. A product manager job description includes defining the product vision and working closely with team members of other departments to deliver winning products.  

Operations Manager

Individuals in the operations manager jobs are responsible for ensuring the efficiency of each department to acquire its optimal goal. They plan the use of resources and distribution of materials. The operations manager's job description includes managing budgets, negotiating contracts, and performing administrative tasks.

Stock Analyst

Individuals who opt for a career as a stock analyst examine the company's investments makes decisions and keep track of financial securities. The nature of such investments will differ from one business to the next. Individuals in the stock analyst career use data mining to forecast a company's profits and revenues, advise clients on whether to buy or sell, participate in seminars, and discussing financial matters with executives and evaluate annual reports.

A Researcher is a professional who is responsible for collecting data and information by reviewing the literature and conducting experiments and surveys. He or she uses various methodological processes to provide accurate data and information that is utilised by academicians and other industry professionals. Here, we will discuss what is a researcher, the researcher's salary, types of researchers.

Welding Engineer

Welding Engineer Job Description: A Welding Engineer work involves managing welding projects and supervising welding teams. He or she is responsible for reviewing welding procedures, processes and documentation. A career as Welding Engineer involves conducting failure analyses and causes on welding issues. 

Transportation Planner

A career as Transportation Planner requires technical application of science and technology in engineering, particularly the concepts, equipment and technologies involved in the production of products and services. In fields like land use, infrastructure review, ecological standards and street design, he or she considers issues of health, environment and performance. A Transportation Planner assigns resources for implementing and designing programmes. He or she is responsible for assessing needs, preparing plans and forecasts and compliance with regulations.

Environmental Engineer

Individuals who opt for a career as an environmental engineer are construction professionals who utilise the skills and knowledge of biology, soil science, chemistry and the concept of engineering to design and develop projects that serve as solutions to various environmental problems. 

Safety Manager

A Safety Manager is a professional responsible for employee’s safety at work. He or she plans, implements and oversees the company’s employee safety. A Safety Manager ensures compliance and adherence to Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) guidelines.

Conservation Architect

A Conservation Architect is a professional responsible for conserving and restoring buildings or monuments having a historic value. He or she applies techniques to document and stabilise the object’s state without any further damage. A Conservation Architect restores the monuments and heritage buildings to bring them back to their original state.

Structural Engineer

A Structural Engineer designs buildings, bridges, and other related structures. He or she analyzes the structures and makes sure the structures are strong enough to be used by the people. A career as a Structural Engineer requires working in the construction process. It comes under the civil engineering discipline. A Structure Engineer creates structural models with the help of computer-aided design software. 

Highway Engineer

Highway Engineer Job Description:  A Highway Engineer is a civil engineer who specialises in planning and building thousands of miles of roads that support connectivity and allow transportation across the country. He or she ensures that traffic management schemes are effectively planned concerning economic sustainability and successful implementation.

Field Surveyor

Are you searching for a Field Surveyor Job Description? A Field Surveyor is a professional responsible for conducting field surveys for various places or geographical conditions. He or she collects the required data and information as per the instructions given by senior officials. 

Orthotist and Prosthetist

Orthotists and Prosthetists are professionals who provide aid to patients with disabilities. They fix them to artificial limbs (prosthetics) and help them to regain stability. There are times when people lose their limbs in an accident. In some other occasions, they are born without a limb or orthopaedic impairment. Orthotists and prosthetists play a crucial role in their lives with fixing them to assistive devices and provide mobility.

Pathologist

A career in pathology in India is filled with several responsibilities as it is a medical branch and affects human lives. The demand for pathologists has been increasing over the past few years as people are getting more aware of different diseases. Not only that, but an increase in population and lifestyle changes have also contributed to the increase in a pathologist’s demand. The pathology careers provide an extremely huge number of opportunities and if you want to be a part of the medical field you can consider being a pathologist. If you want to know more about a career in pathology in India then continue reading this article.

Veterinary Doctor

Speech therapist, gynaecologist.

Gynaecology can be defined as the study of the female body. The job outlook for gynaecology is excellent since there is evergreen demand for one because of their responsibility of dealing with not only women’s health but also fertility and pregnancy issues. Although most women prefer to have a women obstetrician gynaecologist as their doctor, men also explore a career as a gynaecologist and there are ample amounts of male doctors in the field who are gynaecologists and aid women during delivery and childbirth. 

Audiologist

The audiologist career involves audiology professionals who are responsible to treat hearing loss and proactively preventing the relevant damage. Individuals who opt for a career as an audiologist use various testing strategies with the aim to determine if someone has a normal sensitivity to sounds or not. After the identification of hearing loss, a hearing doctor is required to determine which sections of the hearing are affected, to what extent they are affected, and where the wound causing the hearing loss is found. As soon as the hearing loss is identified, the patients are provided with recommendations for interventions and rehabilitation such as hearing aids, cochlear implants, and appropriate medical referrals. While audiology is a branch of science that studies and researches hearing, balance, and related disorders.

An oncologist is a specialised doctor responsible for providing medical care to patients diagnosed with cancer. He or she uses several therapies to control the cancer and its effect on the human body such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation therapy and biopsy. An oncologist designs a treatment plan based on a pathology report after diagnosing the type of cancer and where it is spreading inside the body.

Are you searching for an ‘Anatomist job description’? An Anatomist is a research professional who applies the laws of biological science to determine the ability of bodies of various living organisms including animals and humans to regenerate the damaged or destroyed organs. If you want to know what does an anatomist do, then read the entire article, where we will answer all your questions.

For an individual who opts for a career as an actor, the primary responsibility is to completely speak to the character he or she is playing and to persuade the crowd that the character is genuine by connecting with them and bringing them into the story. This applies to significant roles and littler parts, as all roles join to make an effective creation. Here in this article, we will discuss how to become an actor in India, actor exams, actor salary in India, and actor jobs. 

Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats create and direct original routines for themselves, in addition to developing interpretations of existing routines. The work of circus acrobats can be seen in a variety of performance settings, including circus, reality shows, sports events like the Olympics, movies and commercials. Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats must be prepared to face rejections and intermittent periods of work. The creativity of acrobats may extend to other aspects of the performance. For example, acrobats in the circus may work with gym trainers, celebrities or collaborate with other professionals to enhance such performance elements as costume and or maybe at the teaching end of the career.

Video Game Designer

Career as a video game designer is filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. A video game designer is someone who is involved in the process of creating a game from day one. He or she is responsible for fulfilling duties like designing the character of the game, the several levels involved, plot, art and similar other elements. Individuals who opt for a career as a video game designer may also write the codes for the game using different programming languages.

Depending on the video game designer job description and experience they may also have to lead a team and do the early testing of the game in order to suggest changes and find loopholes.

Radio Jockey

Radio Jockey is an exciting, promising career and a great challenge for music lovers. If you are really interested in a career as radio jockey, then it is very important for an RJ to have an automatic, fun, and friendly personality. If you want to get a job done in this field, a strong command of the language and a good voice are always good things. Apart from this, in order to be a good radio jockey, you will also listen to good radio jockeys so that you can understand their style and later make your own by practicing.

A career as radio jockey has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. If you want to know more about a career as radio jockey, and how to become a radio jockey then continue reading the article.

Choreographer

The word “choreography" actually comes from Greek words that mean “dance writing." Individuals who opt for a career as a choreographer create and direct original dances, in addition to developing interpretations of existing dances. A Choreographer dances and utilises his or her creativity in other aspects of dance performance. For example, he or she may work with the music director to select music or collaborate with other famous choreographers to enhance such performance elements as lighting, costume and set design.

Social Media Manager

A career as social media manager involves implementing the company’s or brand’s marketing plan across all social media channels. Social media managers help in building or improving a brand’s or a company’s website traffic, build brand awareness, create and implement marketing and brand strategy. Social media managers are key to important social communication as well.

Photographer

Photography is considered both a science and an art, an artistic means of expression in which the camera replaces the pen. In a career as a photographer, an individual is hired to capture the moments of public and private events, such as press conferences or weddings, or may also work inside a studio, where people go to get their picture clicked. Photography is divided into many streams each generating numerous career opportunities in photography. With the boom in advertising, media, and the fashion industry, photography has emerged as a lucrative and thrilling career option for many Indian youths.

An individual who is pursuing a career as a producer is responsible for managing the business aspects of production. They are involved in each aspect of production from its inception to deception. Famous movie producers review the script, recommend changes and visualise the story. 

They are responsible for overseeing the finance involved in the project and distributing the film for broadcasting on various platforms. A career as a producer is quite fulfilling as well as exhaustive in terms of playing different roles in order for a production to be successful. Famous movie producers are responsible for hiring creative and technical personnel on contract basis.

Copy Writer

In a career as a copywriter, one has to consult with the client and understand the brief well. A career as a copywriter has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. Several new mediums of advertising are opening therefore making it a lucrative career choice. Students can pursue various copywriter courses such as Journalism , Advertising , Marketing Management . Here, we have discussed how to become a freelance copywriter, copywriter career path, how to become a copywriter in India, and copywriting career outlook. 

In a career as a vlogger, one generally works for himself or herself. However, once an individual has gained viewership there are several brands and companies that approach them for paid collaboration. It is one of those fields where an individual can earn well while following his or her passion. 

Ever since internet costs got reduced the viewership for these types of content has increased on a large scale. Therefore, a career as a vlogger has a lot to offer. If you want to know more about the Vlogger eligibility, roles and responsibilities then continue reading the article. 

For publishing books, newspapers, magazines and digital material, editorial and commercial strategies are set by publishers. Individuals in publishing career paths make choices about the markets their businesses will reach and the type of content that their audience will be served. Individuals in book publisher careers collaborate with editorial staff, designers, authors, and freelance contributors who develop and manage the creation of content.

Careers in journalism are filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. One cannot afford to miss out on the details. As it is the small details that provide insights into a story. Depending on those insights a journalist goes about writing a news article. A journalism career can be stressful at times but if you are someone who is passionate about it then it is the right choice for you. If you want to know more about the media field and journalist career then continue reading this article.

Individuals in the editor career path is an unsung hero of the news industry who polishes the language of the news stories provided by stringers, reporters, copywriters and content writers and also news agencies. Individuals who opt for a career as an editor make it more persuasive, concise and clear for readers. In this article, we will discuss the details of the editor's career path such as how to become an editor in India, editor salary in India and editor skills and qualities.

Individuals who opt for a career as a reporter may often be at work on national holidays and festivities. He or she pitches various story ideas and covers news stories in risky situations. Students can pursue a BMC (Bachelor of Mass Communication) , B.M.M. (Bachelor of Mass Media) , or  MAJMC (MA in Journalism and Mass Communication) to become a reporter. While we sit at home reporters travel to locations to collect information that carries a news value.  

Corporate Executive

Are you searching for a Corporate Executive job description? A Corporate Executive role comes with administrative duties. He or she provides support to the leadership of the organisation. A Corporate Executive fulfils the business purpose and ensures its financial stability. In this article, we are going to discuss how to become corporate executive.

Multimedia Specialist

A multimedia specialist is a media professional who creates, audio, videos, graphic image files, computer animations for multimedia applications. He or she is responsible for planning, producing, and maintaining websites and applications. 

Quality Controller

A quality controller plays a crucial role in an organisation. He or she is responsible for performing quality checks on manufactured products. He or she identifies the defects in a product and rejects the product. 

A quality controller records detailed information about products with defects and sends it to the supervisor or plant manager to take necessary actions to improve the production process.

Production Manager

A QA Lead is in charge of the QA Team. The role of QA Lead comes with the responsibility of assessing services and products in order to determine that he or she meets the quality standards. He or she develops, implements and manages test plans. 

Process Development Engineer

The Process Development Engineers design, implement, manufacture, mine, and other production systems using technical knowledge and expertise in the industry. They use computer modeling software to test technologies and machinery. An individual who is opting career as Process Development Engineer is responsible for developing cost-effective and efficient processes. They also monitor the production process and ensure it functions smoothly and efficiently.

AWS Solution Architect

An AWS Solution Architect is someone who specializes in developing and implementing cloud computing systems. He or she has a good understanding of the various aspects of cloud computing and can confidently deploy and manage their systems. He or she troubleshoots the issues and evaluates the risk from the third party. 

Azure Administrator

An Azure Administrator is a professional responsible for implementing, monitoring, and maintaining Azure Solutions. He or she manages cloud infrastructure service instances and various cloud servers as well as sets up public and private cloud systems. 

Computer Programmer

Careers in computer programming primarily refer to the systematic act of writing code and moreover include wider computer science areas. The word 'programmer' or 'coder' has entered into practice with the growing number of newly self-taught tech enthusiasts. Computer programming careers involve the use of designs created by software developers and engineers and transforming them into commands that can be implemented by computers. These commands result in regular usage of social media sites, word-processing applications and browsers.

Information Security Manager

Individuals in the information security manager career path involves in overseeing and controlling all aspects of computer security. The IT security manager job description includes planning and carrying out security measures to protect the business data and information from corruption, theft, unauthorised access, and deliberate attack 

ITSM Manager

Automation test engineer.

An Automation Test Engineer job involves executing automated test scripts. He or she identifies the project’s problems and troubleshoots them. The role involves documenting the defect using management tools. He or she works with the application team in order to resolve any issues arising during the testing process. 

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Student Opinion

How Did the Covid-19 Pandemic Affect You, Your Family and Your Community?

This week is the fourth anniversary of the pandemic. What are your most lasting memories? How did it reshape your life — and the world?

By Jeremy Engle

It has been four years since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. The New York Times writes of the anniversary:

Four years ago today, society began to shut down. Shortly after noon Eastern on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid — or “the coronavirus,” then the more popular term — to be a global pandemic. Stocks plummeted in the afternoon. In the span of a single hour that night, President Donald Trump delivered an Oval Office address about Covid, Tom Hanks posted on Instagram that he had the virus and the N.B.A. announced it had canceled the rest of its season. It was a Wednesday, and thousands of schools would shut by the end of the week. Workplaces closed, too. People washed their hands frequently and touched elbows instead of shaking hands (although the C.D.C. continued to discourage widespread mask wearing for several more weeks). The worst pandemic in a century had begun.

For some people, the earliest days of the pandemic may feel like a lifetime ago; for others, it may feel like just yesterday. But for all of us Covid has indelibly changed our lives and the world. What do you remember about the earliest days of the pandemic? When did it first hit home for you? How did it affect you, your family and your community? What lessons did you learn about yourself and the world?

In “ Four Years On, Covid Has Reshaped Life for Many Americans ,” Julie Bosman writes that while the threat of severe illness and death has faded for many people, the pandemic’s effects still linger:

Jessie Thompson, a 36-year-old mother of two in Chicago, is reminded of the Covid-19 pandemic every day. Sometimes it happens when she picks up her children from day care and then lets them romp around at a neighborhood park on the way home. Other times, it’s when she gets out the shower at 7 a.m. after a weekday workout. “I always think: In my past life, I’d have to be on the train in 15 minutes,” said Ms. Thompson, a manager at United Airlines. A hybrid work schedule has replaced her daily commute to the company headquarters in downtown Chicago, giving Ms. Thompson more time with her children and a deeper connection to her neighbors. “The pandemic is such a negative memory,” she said. “But I have this bright spot of goodness from it.” For much of the United States, the pandemic is now firmly in the past, four years to the day that the Trump administration declared a national emergency as the virus spread uncontrollably. But for many Americans, the pandemic’s effects are still a prominent part of their daily lives. In interviews, some people said that the changes are subtle but unmistakable: Their world feels a little smaller, with less socializing and fewer crowds. Parents who began to home-school their children never stopped. Many people are continuing to mourn relatives and spouses who died of Covid or of complications from the coronavirus. The World Health Organization dropped its global health emergency designation in May 2023, but millions of people who survived the virus are suffering from long Covid, a mysterious and frequently debilitating condition that causes fatigue, muscle pain and cognitive decline . One common sentiment has emerged. The changes brought on by the pandemic now feel lasting, a shift that may have permanently reshaped American life.

As part of our coverage of the pandemic’s anniversary, The Times asked readers how Covid has changed their attitudes toward life. Here is what they said:

“I’m a much more grateful person. Life is precious, and I see the beauty in all the little miracles that happen all around me. I’m a humbled human being now. I have more empathy and compassion towards everyone.” — Gil Gallegos, 59, Las Vegas, N.M. “The pandemic has completely changed my approach to educating my child. My spouse and I had never seriously considered home-schooling until March 2020. Now, we wouldn’t have it any other way.” — Kim Harper, 47, Clinton, Md. “I had contamination O.C.D. before the pandemic began. The last four years have been a steady string of my worst fears coming true. I never feel safe anymore. I know very well now that my body can betray me at any time.” — Adelia Brown, 23, Madison, Wis. “I don’t take for granted the pleasure of being around people. Going to a show, a road trip, a restaurant, people watching at the opera. I love it.” — Philip Gunnels, 66, Sugar Land, Texas “My remaining years are limited. On the one hand, I feel cheated out of many experiences I was looking forward to; on the other hand, I do not want to live my remaining years with long Covid. It’s hard.” — Sandra Wulach, 77, Edison, N.J.

Students, read one or both of the articles and then tell us:

How did the Covid-19 pandemic affect you, your family and your community? How did it reshape your life and the world? What are your most lasting memories of this difficult period? What do you want to remember most? What do you want to forget?

How did you change during this time? What did you learn about yourself and about life? What do you wish you knew then that you know now?

Ms. Bosman writes that some of the people she interviewed revealed that four years after the global pandemic began, “Their world feels a little smaller, with less socializing and fewer crowds.” However, Gil Gallegos told The Times: “I’m a much more grateful person. Life is precious, and I see the beauty in all the little miracles that happen all around me. I’m a humbled human being now. I have more empathy and compassion towards everyone.” Which of the experiences shared in the two articles reminded you the most of your own during and after the pandemic and why? How did Covid change your overall outlook on life?

“The last normal day of school.” “The nursing home shut its doors.” “The bride wore Lululemon.” These are just a few quotes from “ When the Pandemic Hit Home ,” an article in which The Times asked readers to share their memories of the world shutting down. Read the article and then tell us about a time when the pandemic hit home for you.

In the last four years, scientists have unraveled some of the biggest mysteries about Covid. In another article , The Times explores many remaining questions about the coronavirus: Are superdodgers real? Is Covid seasonal? And what’s behind its strangest symptoms? Read the article and then tell us what questions you still have about the virus and its effects.

How do you think history books will tell the story of the pandemic? If you were to put together a time capsule of artifacts from this era to show people 100 years from now, what would you include and why? What will you tell your grandchildren about what it was like to live during this time?

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.

Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.

Jeremy Engle joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2018 after spending more than 20 years as a classroom humanities and documentary-making teacher, professional developer and curriculum designer working with students and teachers across the country. More about Jeremy Engle

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Read these 12 moving essays about life during coronavirus

Artists, novelists, critics, and essayists are writing the first draft of history.

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The world is grappling with an invisible, deadly enemy, trying to understand how to live with the threat posed by a virus . For some writers, the only way forward is to put pen to paper, trying to conceptualize and document what it feels like to continue living as countries are under lockdown and regular life seems to have ground to a halt.

So as the coronavirus pandemic has stretched around the world, it’s sparked a crop of diary entries and essays that describe how life has changed. Novelists, critics, artists, and journalists have put words to the feelings many are experiencing. The result is a first draft of how we’ll someday remember this time, filled with uncertainty and pain and fear as well as small moments of hope and humanity.

At the New York Review of Books, Ali Bhutto writes that in Karachi, Pakistan, the government-imposed curfew due to the virus is “eerily reminiscent of past military clampdowns”:

Beneath the quiet calm lies a sense that society has been unhinged and that the usual rules no longer apply. Small groups of pedestrians look on from the shadows, like an audience watching a spectacle slowly unfolding. People pause on street corners and in the shade of trees, under the watchful gaze of the paramilitary forces and the police.

His essay concludes with the sobering note that “in the minds of many, Covid-19 is just another life-threatening hazard in a city that stumbles from one crisis to another.”

Writing from Chattanooga, novelist Jamie Quatro documents the mixed ways her neighbors have been responding to the threat, and the frustration of conflicting direction, or no direction at all, from local, state, and federal leaders:

Whiplash, trying to keep up with who’s ordering what. We’re already experiencing enough chaos without this back-and-forth. Why didn’t the federal government issue a nationwide shelter-in-place at the get-go, the way other countries did? What happens when one state’s shelter-in-place ends, while others continue? Do states still under quarantine close their borders? We are still one nation, not fifty individual countries. Right?

Award-winning photojournalist Alessio Mamo, quarantined with his partner Marta in Sicily after she tested positive for the virus, accompanies his photographs in the Guardian of their confinement with a reflection on being confined :

The doctors asked me to take a second test, but again I tested negative. Perhaps I’m immune? The days dragged on in my apartment, in black and white, like my photos. Sometimes we tried to smile, imagining that I was asymptomatic, because I was the virus. Our smiles seemed to bring good news. My mother left hospital, but I won’t be able to see her for weeks. Marta started breathing well again, and so did I. I would have liked to photograph my country in the midst of this emergency, the battles that the doctors wage on the frontline, the hospitals pushed to their limits, Italy on its knees fighting an invisible enemy. That enemy, a day in March, knocked on my door instead.

In the New York Times Magazine, deputy editor Jessica Lustig writes with devastating clarity about her family’s life in Brooklyn while her husband battled the virus, weeks before most people began taking the threat seriously:

At the door of the clinic, we stand looking out at two older women chatting outside the doorway, oblivious. Do I wave them away? Call out that they should get far away, go home, wash their hands, stay inside? Instead we just stand there, awkwardly, until they move on. Only then do we step outside to begin the long three-block walk home. I point out the early magnolia, the forsythia. T says he is cold. The untrimmed hairs on his neck, under his beard, are white. The few people walking past us on the sidewalk don’t know that we are visitors from the future. A vision, a premonition, a walking visitation. This will be them: Either T, in the mask, or — if they’re lucky — me, tending to him.

Essayist Leslie Jamison writes in the New York Review of Books about being shut away alone in her New York City apartment with her 2-year-old daughter since she became sick:

The virus. Its sinewy, intimate name. What does it feel like in my body today? Shivering under blankets. A hot itch behind the eyes. Three sweatshirts in the middle of the day. My daughter trying to pull another blanket over my body with her tiny arms. An ache in the muscles that somehow makes it hard to lie still. This loss of taste has become a kind of sensory quarantine. It’s as if the quarantine keeps inching closer and closer to my insides. First I lost the touch of other bodies; then I lost the air; now I’ve lost the taste of bananas. Nothing about any of these losses is particularly unique. I’ve made a schedule so I won’t go insane with the toddler. Five days ago, I wrote Walk/Adventure! on it, next to a cut-out illustration of a tiger—as if we’d see tigers on our walks. It was good to keep possibility alive.

At Literary Hub, novelist Heidi Pitlor writes about the elastic nature of time during her family’s quarantine in Massachusetts:

During a shutdown, the things that mark our days—commuting to work, sending our kids to school, having a drink with friends—vanish and time takes on a flat, seamless quality. Without some self-imposed structure, it’s easy to feel a little untethered. A friend recently posted on Facebook: “For those who have lost track, today is Blursday the fortyteenth of Maprilay.” ... Giving shape to time is especially important now, when the future is so shapeless. We do not know whether the virus will continue to rage for weeks or months or, lord help us, on and off for years. We do not know when we will feel safe again. And so many of us, minus those who are gifted at compartmentalization or denial, remain largely captive to fear. We may stay this way if we do not create at least the illusion of movement in our lives, our long days spent with ourselves or partners or families.

Novelist Lauren Groff writes at the New York Review of Books about trying to escape the prison of her fears while sequestered at home in Gainesville, Florida:

Some people have imaginations sparked only by what they can see; I blame this blinkered empiricism for the parks overwhelmed with people, the bars, until a few nights ago, thickly thronged. My imagination is the opposite. I fear everything invisible to me. From the enclosure of my house, I am afraid of the suffering that isn’t present before me, the people running out of money and food or drowning in the fluid in their lungs, the deaths of health-care workers now growing ill while performing their duties. I fear the federal government, which the right wing has so—intentionally—weakened that not only is it insufficient to help its people, it is actively standing in help’s way. I fear we won’t sufficiently punish the right. I fear leaving the house and spreading the disease. I fear what this time of fear is doing to my children, their imaginations, and their souls.

At ArtForum , Berlin-based critic and writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen reflects on martinis, melancholia, and Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo’s 2018 graphic novel Retreat , in which three young people exile themselves in the woods:

In melancholia, the shape of what is ending, and its temporality, is sprawling and incomprehensible. The ambivalence makes it hard to bear. The world of Retreat is rendered in lush pink and purple watercolors, which dissolve into wild and messy abstractions. In apocalypse, the divisions established in genesis bleed back out. My own Corona-retreat is similarly soft, color-field like, each day a blurred succession of quarantinis, YouTube–yoga, and televized press conferences. As restrictions mount, so does abstraction. For now, I’m still rooting for love to save the world.

At the Paris Review , Matt Levin writes about reading Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves during quarantine:

A retreat, a quarantine, a sickness—they simultaneously distort and clarify, curtail and expand. It is an ideal state in which to read literature with a reputation for difficulty and inaccessibility, those hermetic books shorn of the handholds of conventional plot or characterization or description. A novel like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is perfect for the state of interiority induced by quarantine—a story of three men and three women, meeting after the death of a mutual friend, told entirely in the overlapping internal monologues of the six, interspersed only with sections of pure, achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a day’s procession and recession of light and waves. The novel is, in my mind’s eye, a perfectly spherical object. It is translucent and shimmering and infinitely fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest disturbance. It is not a book that can be read in snatches on the subway—it demands total absorption. Though it revels in a stark emotional nakedness, the book remains aloof, remote in its own deep self-absorption.

In an essay for the Financial Times, novelist Arundhati Roy writes with anger about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anemic response to the threat, but also offers a glimmer of hope for the future:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

From Boston, Nora Caplan-Bricker writes in The Point about the strange contraction of space under quarantine, in which a friend in Beirut is as close as the one around the corner in the same city:

It’s a nice illusion—nice to feel like we’re in it together, even if my real world has shrunk to one person, my husband, who sits with his laptop in the other room. It’s nice in the same way as reading those essays that reframe social distancing as solidarity. “We must begin to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don’t do is also brilliant and full of love,” the poet Anne Boyer wrote on March 10th, the day that Massachusetts declared a state of emergency. If you squint, you could almost make sense of this quarantine as an effort to flatten, along with the curve, the distinctions we make between our bonds with others. Right now, I care for my neighbor in the same way I demonstrate love for my mother: in all instances, I stay away. And in moments this month, I have loved strangers with an intensity that is new to me. On March 14th, the Saturday night after the end of life as we knew it, I went out with my dog and found the street silent: no lines for restaurants, no children on bicycles, no couples strolling with little cups of ice cream. It had taken the combined will of thousands of people to deliver such a sudden and complete emptiness. I felt so grateful, and so bereft.

And on his own website, musician and artist David Byrne writes about rediscovering the value of working for collective good , saying that “what is happening now is an opportunity to learn how to change our behavior”:

In emergencies, citizens can suddenly cooperate and collaborate. Change can happen. We’re going to need to work together as the effects of climate change ramp up. In order for capitalism to survive in any form, we will have to be a little more socialist. Here is an opportunity for us to see things differently — to see that we really are all connected — and adjust our behavior accordingly. Are we willing to do this? Is this moment an opportunity to see how truly interdependent we all are? To live in a world that is different and better than the one we live in now? We might be too far down the road to test every asymptomatic person, but a change in our mindsets, in how we view our neighbors, could lay the groundwork for the collective action we’ll need to deal with other global crises. The time to see how connected we all are is now.

The portrait these writers paint of a world under quarantine is multifaceted. Our worlds have contracted to the confines of our homes, and yet in some ways we’re more connected than ever to one another. We feel fear and boredom, anger and gratitude, frustration and strange peace. Uncertainty drives us to find metaphors and images that will let us wrap our minds around what is happening.

Yet there’s no single “what” that is happening. Everyone is contending with the pandemic and its effects from different places and in different ways. Reading others’ experiences — even the most frightening ones — can help alleviate the loneliness and dread, a little, and remind us that what we’re going through is both unique and shared by all.

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The global impact of the coronavirus pandemic

John hiscott.

a Pasteur Laboratory, Istituto Pasteur Italia - Fondazione Cenci Bolognetti, Rome, 00161 Italy

Magdalini Alexandridi

Michela muscolini, evelyne tassone, enrico palermo, maria soultsioti.

b Molecular Virology Laboratory, Department of Medical Microbiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands

Alessandra Zevini

The coronavirus pandemic has engulfed the nations of the world for the first five months of 2020 and altered the pace, fabric and nature of our lives. In this overview accompanying the Special Issue of Cytokine & Growth Factor Reviews , we examine some of the many social and scientific issues impacted by SARS-CoV2 – personal lives, economy, scientific communication, the environment. International members of Istituto Pasteur in Rome and INITIATE, the Marie Curie Training Network reflect on the lasting global impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

1. Introduction

The World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on January 30, 2020 and a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. Countries were urged by WHO to adopt strict social distancing and quarantine measures to avoid virus spread and to protect public health [ 1 ]. Despite fragmented international efforts to contain the spread, SARS-CoV2 has spread to 213 countries, resulting in more than 5 million cases and deaths approaching 400,000 since its formal identification in Wuhan China in December 2019. This issue of Cytokine & Growth Factor Reviews is devoted to reviews from around the globe, describing the rapidly accumulating knowledge about the virus, the immunopathogenic consequences of severe disease, the consequences of the cytokine storm and potential therapeutic interventions that could improve morbidity and mortality until a vaccine can be developed and made available. Below, members of Istituto Pasteur in Rome and the Marie Curie ITN INITIATE ( https://initiate-itn.eu ) reflect on the lasting global impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

2. Warning signs

“ Pestilence is in fact very common, but we find it hard to believe in a pestilence when it descends upon us. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise .”

- Albert Camus, The Plague

‘How quickly it hit us’ – this is one of the most common sentiments about the Covid-19 pandemic. We were all caught off guard in one way or another; in an instant, an obscure outbreak of pneumonia in an exotic foreign locale - in the next, a viral outbreak jumping from China to the heart of Italy, then to all of Europe, on to America - finally a plague that stopped the world. As the pandemic hit all countries of the globe, it became indisputably clear that everyone was connected - united against a viral scourge [ 2 ].

Despite the shock, there were plenty of warning signs. Since the beginning of the 21st century, recurring outbreaks and epidemics presaged what was coming - there was the first SARS outbreak in 2003, H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009, MERS coronavirus in 2011, Ebola in 2014−16; mosquito-borne Zika in 2016. A collage of news magazines ( Fig. 1 ) screamed out warnings of an impending pandemic but the clichéd phrase ‘it’s not a matter of if, but when’ continued to be ignored. Even the messages from political leaders (Presidents Barak Obama and George W. Bush) and scientific leaders (NIAID Director Anthony Fauci) went unheard. Below are links to their statements from 2005 to 2017.

Magazine covers from recent years announcing the arrival of new virus outbreaks around the globe.

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/04/10/barack-obama-2014-pandemic-comments-sot-ctn-vpx.cnn

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/george-bush-2005-wait-pandemic-late-prepare/story?id=69979013

https://www.sciencealert.com/niaid-director-warned-us-government-of-a-surprise-outbreak-in-2017

International cooperation and a unified strategy of pandemic preparedness were not a priority. In the end, there was no united response - a global leadership void painfully revealed at a moment when it was most needed. What resulted was an international cacophony of last moment efforts, strategies and opinions to suppress the viral pandemic - after it was already upon the world.

3. Global scientific response

“ I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing .”

In order to tackle the Covid-19 crisis, an unparalleled international scientific response has been launched with the goal to understand viral genetics, immunopathogenesis, and therapeutic strategies. Public and private funders across the globe have launched an unprecedented number of initiatives to support multidisciplinary projects addressing the detection, treatment and prevention of SARS-CoV2 infections. Most of the calls encourage collaboration between international scientists, industry, healthcare community, and government policy makers, to facilitate a well-integrated COVID-19 response. The dramatic effects of COVID-19 outbreak taught us that similar pandemics cannot be managed solely at the national level. For this reason, alliances, consortia and networks have emerged on every continent, to connect experts in different research areas of fundamental science, clinical trials, social and behavioural sciences, engineering, and bioinformatics [ 3 ].

In the same context, it has been remarkable how research groups and companies from all over the world have been “repurposing” equipment, facilities and product lines in a joint effort for a rapid response against the ongoing pandemic. Companies that were once producing perfume switched gears to production of much-needed hand sanitizers and disinfectants; industrial companies switched to making face masks which were in short supply in many countries, and automotive companies started production of medical devices, such as ventilators. Scientists in non-virology research fields, who were required to halt their research indefinitely due to the lockdowns, turned their laboratories into diagnostic testing facilities for SARS-CoV-2 and organized into volunteer groups to help researchers on the front lines with their skills and expertise [ [4] , [5] , [6] , [7] ].

This pandemic has also brought to light the importance of open science, data-sharing and new means of communication among members of the scientific community [ [7] , [8] , [9] , [10] ]. Numerous data sets are available publicly, alongside literature reviews and preprint articles in bioarxiv and medarxiv portals. This openness has resulted in a massive amount of information spreading swiftly, which is an important driving force moving COVID-19 research forward in a short time. Of course, such openness comes with a cost: the surge of preprints available in bioarxiv and medarxiv has made it harder to keep up with the screening process of articles to be published in the preprint repositories. More than ever before, information needs to be scrutinized before going public to avoid the danger of inaccuracies, misinformation or even conspiracy theories. Such a situation is unprecedented, as no other pandemic in human history has been tackled in this way. Many scientists all over the world welcome this new form of communication and data-sharing and believe that eventually there will be a balance between good-quality information spreading quicker versus perfect-quality information that is unavailable until much later [ 8 ].

The EU joined forces to coordinate a common response against the coronavirus pandemic. On 30th January 2020, when the pandemic was not declared yet, European Commission mobilized a budget of €10 million for research, that was subsequently increased to €47.5 million [ 11 ]; later on, the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a partnership between the European Commission and the pharmaceutical industry, invested a total of 90 € million for research proposals to combat the COVID-19 emergency [ 12 ]. During the Coronavirus Global Response pledging event organized by the EU together with WHO (May 4th), €7.4 billion was raised from donors worldwide, to be used “for developing, producing and deploying a vaccine for all”, the European Commission President von der Leyen said [ 13 ]. In the UK, Government invested £20 million to fund new studies against coronavirus, including studies to sequence the different virus isolates as a tool to understand virus behaviour, mutation frequency, virus spread and emergence of new strains [ 14 , 15 ].

Part of these funds will be also used to allow the rapid, large scale production of a vaccine. With more than 100 research laboratories conducting vaccine development research, and with eight vaccine candidates already moving to clinal trials, the race to develop an effective prophylactic vaccine is on [ 16 , 22 ]. Since the biotech firm Moderna announced plans to launch vaccine trials in humans, the US government has invested $483 million to scale up that company’s vaccine production [ 17 ]. Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), together with other government organizations and biotech companies, set up a partnership to coordinate efforts against the COVID-19 pandemic, giving priority to the development of an efficient vaccine and therapeutic drugs [ 18 ]. Days ago, Moderna announced the results of a small eight-person phase I trial of their spike mRNA vaccine candidate, and the preliminary results indicate that all subjects developed antibodies, even at the lowest dose of inoculum [ 19 ], encouraging the company to proceed with a phase II clinical trial that will involve 600 participants. However, scientists are cautious over the successes of such vaccine candidates since the levels of the immune response needed to grant protection against SARS-CoV-2 are not yet well understood [ 8 ].

European biotech companies are also working to develop a potential COVID-19 vaccine. In Germany, BioNTech has designed four vaccine candidates that deliver mRNA encoding four different viral antigens [ 20 ]; ReiThera in Rome, Leukocare in Munich, and Univercells in Brussels have announced the creation of a European consortium that will start the clinical trials of a COVID-19 vaccine. The two pharma giants Sanofi and GSK have recently started a collaboration finalized to the development of an adjuvanted COVID-19 vaccine [ 21 22 ]

To contribute to the pandemic effort, the COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium demonstrates cooperation amongst global high tech giants Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM; the HPC Consortium offers services, resources and expertise to support molecular modelling projects as the simulation of SARS-CoV2 entering in a host cell, the high throughput screening of drug candidates, and the evaluation of patients’ genomic features with prognostic values [ 23 ].

4. Lockdown & social distance

“The public lacked, in short, standards of comparison. It was only as time passed and the steady rise in the death-rate could not be ignored that public opinion became alive to the truth.”

A. Europe. As the pandemic spread throughout the world, countries took drastic measures to protect their citizens. These measures focused on achieving a fragile balance between limiting virus spread from person to person and maintaining economic activity. It was an impossible balance, although the timing of the implementation of these measures proved to be crucial, both for public health and SARS-CoV2 spread, as well as the economic impact on each country. Early lockdown and strict enforcement were the most effective strategies available to limit virus spread [ 24 , 25 ]. In an accompanying article in this issue, Olagnier & Mogensen describe the implementation of lockdown procedures in Denmark, a country with a remarkably rapid and effective response. The trilogy - social distance, personal hygiene, protective mask – became the mantra throughout Europe and the world.

Follow the spread of Covid-19 in a worldwide cases timeline ( Fig. 2 ): ( https://www.worldometer.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs ).

Global distribution of the Covid-19 cases.

Working in close cooperation with the WHO and EU Member States, the European Union took clear, strict measures, based on the best available scientific expertise. Some member countries faced a significantly limited availability of personal protective equipment (PPE) and the public health systems came close to collapse from the ever-increasing number of severe cases requiring emergency intensive care and ventilation [ 26 ]. In some cases, medical equipment destined for other countries was confiscated [ 27 ]. On the 20th of March, the EU announced a funding scheme of 1,3 billion euro for bulk purchase of PPE [ 28 ]; unfortunately, the UK missed the opportunity to join that funding scheme [ 29 ].

In Europe, health systems adapted to the crisis by mobilizing staff, increasing pharmaceutical spending on vaccine development, and optimizing space with the aim to increase the number and availability of intensive care beds capacity. The European average is currently 11.5 critical care beds per 100.000 capita of population [ 30 ]; in addition to the shortage of ICU beds and ventilators, the lack of health workers to staff the new units became critical. Countries such as France used army forces and camps to transport patients and optimize care bed capacity [ 31 ]. Germany, with the highest proportion of ICU beds per capita of population and one of the best European health systems, campaigned to obtain the medical help of foreign doctors who were living in Germany but did not yet have a license to practice medicine [ 32 ]. In Italy, the Netherlands, France and the UK, retired doctors, nurses and medical students were recruited to help [ 33 ].

Rather than impose a lockdown of its population, the UK initially followed a mitigation strategy to build population immunity but abandoned this plan after realizing it would result in ‘hundreds of thousands of deaths,’ as noted in a report from the Imperial College's COVID-19 response team [ 34 ]. The subsequent illness of the Prime Minister and his transfer to intensive care further contributed to the realization that strict lockdown measures were necessary. Despite ongoing restrictions in the UK, the number of cases continues to rise, the death rate is the highest in Europe and the curve of infections has yet to plateau – a reflection of the lag time before the start of the lockdown.

The Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Coronavirus Resource Center ( http//:coronavirus.jhu.edu ) provides an important live global update of the spread of SARS-CoV2 that includes world map, US map and critical trends. As of 20th May 2020, the total reported cases in Europe were 1,909,592, and the total deaths are 167,538. The UK currently has the highest number of cases & deaths (250,138 & 35,169), followed by Italy (226, 699 & 32,169), Spain (232,037 & 27,778) and France (180,933 & 25,025).

Sweden similarly followed a plan of ‘voluntary’ social distancing, with the country remaining open. With a population of 10 million, the country remains amongst the top 25 in the world in terms of total number of cases, even though testing is reserved only for those with severe symptoms. These measures have not proved to be effective, and altogether the country has registered 5–10 times more deaths than neighboring Scandinavian countries. The above examples again demonstrate that fast response and strict lockdown saved lives.

JHU lists Sweden with 30,799 cases and 3743 deaths, compared to Denmark (11,315 & 551), Finland (6399 & 301) and Norway (8267 & 233).

Moreover, results from a recent antibody testing study across Spain showed that only 5% of the total number of participants tested positive for exposure to the virus and developed some level of immunity [ 35 , 36 ]. A modelling study, based on data obtained from French hospitals, has shown that by the 11th of May only 4.4 % of the French population had developed potential immunity against SARS-CoV-2 [ 37 ] Such numbers, even if remotely accurate, make it clear that letting the infection run its natural course will not result in protection levels high enough to satisfy the criteria of herd-immunity. On the other hand, if such data are interpreted as a low percentage of the population exposed to SARS-CoV-2 in two of the most affected countries in Europe, this showcases a massive positive impact of lockdown measures in containing the spread of the virus.

Lockdowns were not the only measures taken to protect public health. Asian countries which had experience with other viral outbreaks rapidly implemented strict movement restrictions and suspended all unnecessary activities, but in parallel ramped up testing for virus, as well as tracking and isolating cases and contacts [ 38 ]. At the same time, China in response to the surge of cases, built new, specially equipped hospitals to increase the number of intensive care beds, while in Korea, hotels were repurposed as care units exclusively for patients suffering from Covid-19. These countries were also the first to ban flights to and from other countries; borders were closed and open only for cargo trade [ 39 , 40 ].

JHU: Many months after the start of the outbreak in China the number of confirmed cases is more than 84,063 and the deaths are 4638; the case fatality ratio is close to 5,5%. As stated on numerous occasions, it is not clear how accurate the Chinese numbers are. Remarkably, in South Korea, the number of cases is 11,110, with only 263 deaths, numbers that reflect the positive impact of in depth efforts in testing, contact tracing and social distancing.

In the pandemic emergency, the lack of PPE and supplies like disinfectants created fear among frontline medics and staff. To draw attention to this aspect, German medical practitioners posed naked on a Twitter page; this protest was inspired by the French doctor Alain Colombié, who affirmed that doctors were being asked “to go to the front without weapons and no defences.” [ 41 ]. For the same reason protest marches involving doctors, nurses and paramedics took place in many countries - in Pakistan, they evolved into violent clashes between police and doctors, in Italy, silent flash-mobs protested the government response [ 42 , 43 ]

“Many continued hoping that the epidemic would soon die out and they and their families be spared. Thus, they felt under no obligation to make any change in their habits, as yet. Plague was an unwelcome visitant, bound to take its leave one day as unexpectedly as it had come.”

B. America. The first case of Covid-19 was confirmed in America on January 21 st and a few days later the White House Coronavirus Task Force was established. But with government inaction about the pandemic, weeks were lost when the government could have prepared its own response, informed the public and identified necessary medical supplies. New York City, with its dense population and hundreds of flights a day from Europe, became the epicenter of the pandemic in America. The first New York case was recognized on March 1, 2020, although reports now indicate that by March 1, there may have been as many as 10,000 cases in the state, imported from Italy and elsewhere. Mixed messages from city and state officials, essentially claiming ‘go on with your lives’ at the beginning of March further confused the response. Additional delays in announcing a lockdown and containment practices (the New York Pause was issued March 22) guaranteed the firm establishment of the virus in the city and state. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo became a daily fixture on the news, providing daily updates on the number of cases, the search for proper medical equipment and the courageous efforts of medical front line personnel. However, with more than 15,000 deaths in New York City, the critical need to recognize and respond swiftly to the virus was once again sadly reinforced by the staggering numbers. In contrast, California reacted more swiftly to the emergence of SARS-CoV2, and issued a ‘stay-at-home’ order on March 19, an important decision when hours and days mattered.

JHU: As of May 21st, New York state listed 354,370 cases with 28,636 deaths, while California registered 85,997 cases and 3497 deaths. For comparison the number of cases/deaths in New York City are 194,550 and 15,789, while in San Francisco, there are 2179 cases and 36 deaths.

By the end of March, all 50 states of the USA reported cases of Covid-19. A few weeks after the first Covid-19 case, the hospitals began reporting supply shortages - both for testing and personal protective equipment, a severe safety issue for frontline medical staff that was never addressed nationally. Rather, it was left to state governors to grapple with the purchase supplies on the international market [ 44 ]. In mid-March the army started constructing new hospital facilities [ 45 ]. As in Europe, large-scale gatherings were prohibited, schools and other educational institutions were closed, businesses shuttered and restrictions on movement were imposed.

JHU: As of 20 May 2020, the total reported cases in USA is 1,528,661, the number of deaths is more than 91,938.

5. Impact on economy

“The truth is that everyone is bored and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, 'doing business.'”

A. Europe. The eurozone was experiencing poor economic growth even before the shock of the pandemic, with an expansion of just 0.1% for the last three months of 2019. The economic productivity of the 19 countries of the Eurozone decreased by 3.8 % for the first three months of 2020, in the shadow of the spread of coronavirus throughout Europe. Analysts now say it is certain that the entire eurozone will experience the largest recession since its creation in the late 1990s. Germany, France and Italy, the three largest economies in the monetary union, have all entered into economic recession, with Eurostat recording an even bigger drop in gross national product (GDP) compared to what markets expected. Although countries have published data only for the first quarter of 2020, analysts predict an even greater recession for the second and third quarters of the year [ [46] , [47] , [48] ].

Of the individual Eurozone countries that published relevant data, France reported that after a recession of 0.1 % for the last quarter of 2019, its economy shrank by 5.8 % for the first 3 months of 2020, the largest recession since the country began recording data in the late 1940s. Italy has also experienced recession for the first half of the year, with the economy shrinking to 4.7 % after falling 0.3 % at the end of 2019. The effects of coronavirus pandemic on an already weak economy were enough to squash it. Spain, one of the countries hit hardest by the pandemic, reported a 5.2 % drop in the first quarter the year, while GDP in Belgium and Austria fell 3.9 % and 2.5 % respectively [ 46 , 47 ].

Germany’s economy shrank by 2.2 % in the first quarter of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic pushed the eurozone's strongest economy into recession; the seasonally adjusted number of unemployed in Germany jumped by 373,000–2.64 million in April. The jobless rate climbed to 5.8 % from a low of 5% the previous month. The government also increased the number of ‘underemployed’ workers to 10.1 million during April; these part-time employment measures helped to maintain the overall employment figures in Germany [ 49 ].

According to Reuters, experts from the World Bank, the World Resources Institute (WRI) and other organizations warn that the coronavirus pandemic will leave behind about 100 million 'new poor’ living in cities around the world due to job losses and income [ 50 , 51 ]. In this scenario, another sad truth must be faced: coronavirus pandemic is widening the gap dividing rich and poor. As for any epidemic, poverty and inequality can exacerbate rates of transmission and mortality. The main factors that sentence poor people to illness are the lack of access to health care, plus poor and crowded living conditions. In the context of the current pandemic, a key mitigating factor in infection risk is the possibility of working remotely, but this is a luxury that a large segment of the workforce doesn’t have. For people who work outside home, the choice is between lose job, lose salary - or keep going out to work amid the pandemic. And because their financial position is more precarious, the only option is to continue to work, travelling in most cases by public transportation, despite the risk of infection for themselves and their families. A primary consequence of this phenomenon is the racial disproportion in sickness and death percentages in the US: African Americans are contracting SARS-CoV2 and dying for it at significantly higher rates compared to white Americans, and this has nothing to do with a biological or genetic predisposition toward coronavirus infection, but is more likely due to a "social predisposition” [ 52 ].

In the European Union, it was decided to provide financial assistance of 5% of its GDP to its member states [ 53 , [ 54 ]. The worst affected countries can use the funds to alleviate the financial burden of the immediate response measures, including assistance to the population, medical assistance and equipment, support to vulnerable groups, and measures to contain the spread of the disease, strengthen preparedness and communication. Among the various fiscal measures adopted to contain the economic fallout, several governments have decided to defer certain payments, including taxes, loans or utility bills, to improve the liquidity positions of individuals and companies facing difficulties. But, in many cases, those measures are not sufficient.

In Italy, the EU country worst affected by coronavirus, economy has been damaged in such a severe manner that people in some regions are running short of food and money. Many of these “new poor” have turned to charities for help, and several cases of looting at supermarkets have been reported. This critical situation encouraged Italians to give a new twist to an old custom known as “suspended coffee”. In this centuries-old Neapolitan tradition, bar customers pay in advance a coffee for someone who can't afford it. The same concept is being applied to “suspended grocery shopping”: customers buy food with a long shelf-life for the needy - such as pasta and canned goods. "Those who can, put something in, those who can't, help yourself": this is the slogan written on solidarity baskets that appeared in supermarkets, local grocery shops and even on the streets throughout Italy [ 55 ]. Beyond these acts of charity, an important help will come from the government, which has designated €400 m for food vouchers to those who can no longer afford groceries [ 56 ].

“He knew quite well that it was plague and, needless to say, he also knew that, were this to be officially admitted, the authorities would be compelled to take very drastic steps. This was, of course, the explanation of his colleagues' reluctance to face the facts.”

B. America. The country with the greatest wealth and medical minds in the world failed to heed warnings from China and then Italy; refused to acknowledge the ‘emergency of international concern’ from the World Health Organization on January 31, 2020; and lacked a pandemic preparedness plan that would have mobilized the American health system to respond to the coming viral pandemic as early as February. A failure of national leadership, compounded by the political divisions, and a fragmented state by state response guaranteed the numbers - more than 1.5 million cases and counting, deaths approaching 100,000. It is impossible to imagine that the United States will emerge from this pandemic with the same perspective on its historic economic inequality.

The coronavirus pandemic has already triggered the sharpest recession in the United States since the Great Depression. For the first 2 1/2 months of 2020, the economy continued to grow at a steady pace, but suddenly halted in mid-March - when businesses, travel industries, restaurants and retail shops were abruptly closed, and tens of millions of Americans were ordered to stay home in an effort to slow the spread of SAR-CoV2.More than 35 million people were suddenly out of work and have filed unemployment claims in recent weeks. The spread of the coronavirus has threatened the social and economic fabric of American communities and revealed in a striking way the inequities of the American system – a single event threw more that 35,000,000 people into joblessness and a step closer to poverty. Expanded unemployment benefits and a one-time stimulus package were forthcoming from the US House and Senate, but these are temporary solutions to a much larger structural inequality that the pandemic has exposed. The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the flaws in the system and revealed two economic conditions that have been left unchecked: poverty and economic insecurity. An inclusive social safety net that includes a basic income and health coverage may be the only solution to ensure that its citizens have a strong foundation for preparedness for the next pandemic.

6. Psychological impact

“Thus, each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky.”

The measures taken to avoid the spread of the new coronavirus have left their mark on the psyche of citizens around the world. At its peak, an estimated 2.6 billion people – or a third of the world’s population – was living under some kind of lockdown or quarantine, arguably the largest psychological experiment ever conducted [ 57 ]. Adapting to new, unprecedented conditions brought a change in our daily routine and our habits, and imposed adverse effects on citizens at multiple levels. Fear of death and the end of humanity, loneliness and isolation at home, sadness and anxiety for the next day and the future of our loved ones are the grounds for psychological disorders. Increases in firearm and alcohol sales have been registered in the US over the last two months, clear signs of the stress and anxiety generated by coronavirus pandemic among people [ 58 , 59 ]. Since the onset of social distancing, calls to domestic abuse helplines or suicide hotlines have intensified all over the world [ 60 , 61 ]. France offered free accommodation to victims of violence in the home and encouraged people to ask for help in pharmacies [ 62 ]. Australia announced a special phone line named “coronavirus wellbeing support line.” [ 63 ]

In late February 2020, before European countries mandated various forms of lockdown, The Lancet published a review documenting the psychological impact of quarantine (the “restriction of movement of people who have potentially been exposed to a contagious disease”). In short, and perhaps unsurprisingly, people who are quarantined are likely to develop a wide range of symptoms of psychological stress and disorder, including low mood, insomnia, stress, anxiety, anger, irritability, emotional exhaustion, depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms [ 64 ]. In China, these expected mental health effects are already being reported in the first research papers about the lockdown [ 65 ]. A study reporting on the long-term effects of SARS quarantine among healthcare workers found a long-term risk for alcohol abuse, self-medication and long-lasting “avoidance” behavior - where some hospital workers avoid being in close contact with patients by simply not showing up for work. Scientists predict that, if the pandemic continues, psychological and social effects of Covid-19 will worsen and create the “perfect storm” of conditions for suicide, especially in the most vulnerable categories, like the elderly, poor and people suffering from previous mental problems [ 66 ].

“Well, personally, I've seen enough of people who die for an idea. I don't believe in heroism; I know it's easy and I've learned that it can be murderous. What interests me is living and dying for what one loves.”

Widespread measures adopted by governments facing the pandemic crisis were social distancing, country-wide lockdown, and restriction of traffic. Numerous constitutionalists have argued that such measures violate human rights, as freedom of movement is a fundamental right directly linked to human nature. However, international human rights law does recognize that during serious public health threats and public emergencies that threaten the life of a nation, restrictions on some rights can be justified.

Various measures have been taken by the majority of the countries to protect human rights in these difficult times. Countries like Ireland, Austria and Argentina have banned the evictions and have announced measures to protect housing, recognizing its role in the crisis response. Portugal announced that people with pending residency and asylum applications will be treated as permanent residents, giving them equal access to free health care [ 67 ]. Initially several incidents of racism and xenophobia were reported towards people of Chinese and Asian descent all over the world [ 68 ]. Some politicians started to use the term “Chinese Virus” to describe the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic and received criticism for their statements. As the virus spread into European countries and Italy became an epicenter, Italians were also subjected to racism. Unfortunately, such incidents are neither extraordinary nor isolated. Socioeconomic and anthropological/archaeological studies have shown that past pandemics, like the 1918 Spanish Flu and the Black Death in the 14th century, affected societies disproportionally [ 69 ]. People at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum were more likely to die from infectious diseases due to different treatment practices (or lack thereof) based on their societal status. African Americans, Latinos and indigenous populations have also faced health care inequalities and discriminations during the course of past pandemics. Since the current pandemic does not yet belong to the past, it is a pivotal moment in history to prevent such discriminations and racial inequalities from leaving their social stigma in the years to come.

7. Misinformation

“There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two do make four is punished with death.”

WHO has repeatedly stated the urgency of adhering to the measures and positions of the scientific community – social distance, personal hygiene and the use of protective masks. But such invasive measures also opened the floodgates of misinformation, with social and mass media spreading a range of questionable information; conspiracy theories, misinformation or non-scientific views regarding the virus, its origin and spread that endanger public health have acquired a criminal character in several countries.

One of the most difficult issues concerned reports that U.S. officials were investigating the possibility that the coronavirus was secretly ‘manufactured’ and/or ‘escaped’ from a Chinese lab in Wuhan, specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There is no scientific evidence to support these theories. The sequencing and analysis of coronavirus genomes have already dispelled these rumors and instead demonstrate that bats are the likeliest source, suggesting that COVID-19 was created by nature, not humans. At its molecular level, the viral genome most closely resembles an isolate that already exists in horseshoe bats in Hunan province. Supported by several studies, bats have an unusually high capacity to harbor viruses and have been linked to past outbreaks, including SARS, MERS and Ebola. The virus may have spread from bats to an intermediary animal before infecting humans; this remains unclear. The fact that the earliest cases of COVID-19 were linked to a live animal market in Wuhan that sold exotic species only bolsters these observations.

In a recent study from Nature Medicine, researchers concluded "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus” [ 70 ]. It is well known that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other Institutes have been studying coronaviruses and bats ever since the SARS outbreak of the early 2000s, but there is no evidence that this research was malicious, rather it was a response to the need to understand the pathogenesis and epidemiology of SARS. High containment research was essential, given earlier outbreaks, as well as warnings from former Presidents and scientific leaders (see above).

In 2003 the Chinese government was legitimately criticized for their attempted cover-up of the original SARS outbreak, leading to skepticism amongst its critics about the openness of its response to the SARS-CoV2 outbreak of 2019. Calls from over 100 nations for an investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV2 and the pandemic have been recognized by Premier Xi of China, with his qualification that the review take place ‘after the virus is under control’. There remains much to learn from the early days of the pandemic and the Chinese response, as well as the pandemic response of other countries. From an epidemiologic perspective, these were critical days; understanding the nature and necessity of the immediate response will only prepare the global community for the next outbreak.

8. An environmental surprise

“What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.”

The massive shutdown of industry, business, global travel, farming and personal movement produced an unanticipated beneficial effect on the environment. All over the world, the levels of air pollution dropped [ 71 ]; in China, a 25 % reduction in carbon emissions has been reported [ 72 ], while in New York, air pollution dropped by 50 %. In northern Italy and central Europe, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) emissions decrease by 5o% ( Fig. 3 ) [ 73 , 74 ].

Reduction of NO2 emissions over Northern Italy – January (left) & March (right). https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2020/03/Coronavirus_nitrogen_dioxide_emissions_drop_over_Italy .

To observe statistics and videos of the impact of the coronavirus lockdown on environmental emissions, please visit: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/coronavirus-lockdowns-emissions/

And, in perhaps the most symbolic evidence of the impact of the global pause on the environment, the canals of Venice have cleared; in this video [ 75 ] a jelly fish swims in the canal, while Venetian buildings are reflected in the clear water.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zDqYvjld18

9. Conclusion

We have reached May 2020 and the lockdown efforts in most countries are winding down. At the time of writing, the population in Italy has moved forward with re-opening the economy; restaurants, stores and businesses are active once again, although the tourists have yet to return. Germany, Spain and France are moving forward with the re-opening their countries after reducing the number of cases and deaths through strict lockdown enforcement. The United States pushes ahead with re-opening business, travel, beaches and bars, despite the continued rise in cases and deaths. And new regions of concern are emerging; Brazil and Russia report massive daily increases in the number of cases and are now becoming the new epicenters, with the second and third highest rates of infection in the world. Singapore and China are carefully evaluating spikes in new cases - using testing, contact tracing and isolation to prevent a ‘second wave’ of coronavirus cases. Research and vaccine development are moving at ‘warp speed’ in the hopes of finding a treatment that will restore us to a new normal. In the first four months of 2020, Covid-19 has engulfed the world; it remains to be seen if global efforts during the next four months will unwrap our planet ( Fig. 4 ).

Wrapped in Corona. A schematic view of the world as SARS-CoV-2 engulfs the planet.

The pandemic continues. Although it is not clear whether the virus will continue to smolder and ignite in different global regions during the summer, or perhaps retreat, only to return to new peaks in the fall and winter, most experts agree that Covid-19 is not going away anytime soon, and will probably be with us for the next two years [ 76 ]. On May 21st, the WHO reported 106,000 new cases of Covid-19 globally, the highest one day total since the pandemic began. As new knowledge about the virus accumulates, new complications of the disease arise, including the recent recognition of a serious Kawasaki-like disorder in children, termed multi-system inflammatory syndrome (MIS). And new modelling research states that had the lockdown of America been imposed two weeks earlier - March 9 vs March 23 - over 80 % of the cases and deaths could have been prevented. This sobering estimate brings us to another unsettling fact; throughout this crisis, efforts have been made to mute and even ridicule the response of scientific leadership to the pandemic. If Covid-19 ushers in a ‘new normal’ for citizens around the world, we hope that new reality will include the recognition that the voice of science, reason and experience must be heard.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Michaela Muscolini, Evelyne Tassone and Enrico Palermo for critical reading and comments. The authors also thank the students of INITIATE, the Marie Curie International Training Network for their scientific perspectives and writings during this pandemic period. Quotations in italics from Albert Camus, The Plague. This project was supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 813343 for the Marie Curie ITN INITIATE program.