how to fight covid 19 essay

The 12 Best COVID-19 Prevention Strategies

BY CARRIE MACMILLAN , JEREMY LEDGER October 12, 2020

Note: Information in this article was accurate at the time of original publication. Because information about COVID-19 changes rapidly, we encourage you to visit the websites of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), World Health Organization (WHO), and your state and local government for the latest information.

It’s been many months since COVID-19 upended our lives. We’ve adjusted to wearing masks, social distancing, constantly our washing hands , and working and learning remotely . But what do we really know about how to prevent COVID-19 infection ?

Scientists, doctors, and public health officials are still trying to fully understand how the virus spreads, what to do to prevent it, and the best ways to treat it. New findings sometimes lead to advice that conflicts with what we’ve been told previously—and it can be a challenge to keep track of it all. Fortunately, there is plenty of solid advice we can still follow. 

“It can be really exhausting to be constantly vigilant and to take precautions, like wearing a mask and physically distancing, which may be physically and emotionally uncomfortable,” says Jaimie Meyer, MD, MS , a Yale Medicine infectious disease expert. “But sustaining these types of behaviors is really key to curbing this pandemic, especially before a vaccine is available.”

Plus, cooler weather is bringing more of us indoors, which is riskier than being outside because there is less airflow and it can be more difficult to keep people 6 feet apart. What’s more, says Dr. Meyer, there’s the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 , the virus that causes COVID-19, is airborne, making ventilation even more important.

The upcoming months also bring seasonal respiratory viruses, like cold and flu , leading to concern about the possibility of a “twindemic” that may overwhelm health care systems already spread thin by COVID-19. These other illnesses can bring confusion because symptoms are very similar to those of COVID-19.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 remains with us, resulting in more than 210,000 deaths in the U.S. to date. As we leave a chaotic spring and summer behind and head into fall, now is a good time to check in with Yale Medicine experts and review the standard—and most recent—advice on how to stay safe.

1. Wear your mask

Wearing a mask that covers your mouth and nose can prevent those who have COVID-19 from spreading the virus to others. Recent evidence suggests that masks may even benefit the wearer, offering some level of protection against infections.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that everyone age 2 years and older wear masks in public settings and around people who don’t live in the same household—when you can’t stay 6 feet apart from others. 

Masks should be made of two or more layers of washable, breathable fabric and fit snugly on your face. “A quick and easy test is to hold your mask up to the light. If light passes through, it’s too thin,” Dr. Meyer says. “Masks only work when they cover the nose and mouth because that is where infected droplets are expelled and because the virus infects people through the mucous membranes in their nose and throat.”

2. Stay socially distant

COVID-19 spreads mainly among people who are within 6 feet of one another (about two arms’ length) for a prolonged period (at least 15 minutes). Virus transmission can occur when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks, which releases droplets from the mouth or nose into the air.

People can be asymptomatic and spread the virus without knowing that they are sick, which makes it especially important to remain 6 feet away from others, whether you are inside or outside. Plus, the more people you interact with at a gathering and the longer time you spend interacting with each, the higher your risk of becoming infected with the virus by someone who has it.

If you are attending an event or gathering of some kind, it’s also important to be aware of the level of community transmission. One method of estimating how high the risk may be is referred to as R 0.

“Pronounced ‘R naught,’ and also known as the reproduction number, this is a measure of how fast a disease is spreading,” explains Onyema Ogbuagu, MBBCh , a Yale Medicine infectious disease expert. “If the reproduction number is 5.0, that means one infected person will spread the virus to an average of five people. Therefore, the lower the rate, the safer it is.”   

The R 0 for COVID-19 is believed to be in the range of 1.4 to 2.9. For comparison, measles, which has the highest reproduction number known among humans, ranges from 12 to 18. Seasonal influenza is around 0.9 and 2.1.

While R 0 refers to the basic, or initial, reproduction number, there is another measurement called R t, which is the current reproduction number and is the average number of people who become infected by an infectious person. If R t is above 1.0, it spreads quickly. If it’s below 1.0, it will eventually stop spreading. You can check the number for each state here .

3. Keep washing your hands

Washing your hands—and well—remains a key step to preventing COVID-19 infection. Wash your hands with soap often, and especially after you have been in a public place or have blown your nose, coughed, or sneezed, the CDC recommends.

You should wash your hands for at least 20 seconds and lather the back of your hands and scrub between all fingers, under all fingernails, and reach up to the wrist, the CDC advises. After washing, dry them completely (with an air dryer or paper towel) and avoid touching the sink, faucet, door handles, or other objects. If no soap is available, use a hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol content, and rub the sanitizer on your hands until they are dry.

Though the CDC states that the primary way the virus spreads is through close person-to-person contact, it may be possible to become infected with COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching your own mouth, nose, or eyes.

Therefore, you should also wash your hands after touching anything that may have been contaminated—such as a banister or door handle in a public place—and before you touch your face.

While the virus can survive for a short period on some surfaces, it is unlikely to be spread from mail or from products or packaging, the CDC says. Likewise, the risk of infection from food (that you cook, is prepared in a restaurant, or is ordered via takeout) is considered to be very low, as is the risk from food packaging or bags.

Still, there is much that is unknown about the virus, and it remains advisable to wash hands thoroughly after handling any food or products that come into your home.

4. Keep holiday gatherings small

Fall and winter also bring holidays, when many families get together. This can be especially tricky for those of us who live in parts of the country where it will no longer be easy to gather outside. “After months apart during this pandemic, families may be less willing to do a group Zoom call,” says Dr. Meyer. “This may be a year where we need to get creative and rethink how to celebrate together.” 

That may simply mean more planning for the holidays, Dr. Meyer says. “Consider quarantining for 14 days prior to the event and/or having everyone get tested for COVID-19 if tests are available in your community,” she suggests. “If possible, limit gatherings to as few people as possible—perhaps just immediate family and close friends. When it is not possible to be outside, encourage your guests to wear masks indoors. Consider spreading out food and eating areas so people are distanced while eating with their masks down.”

Remember that your elderly family members and those with other medical conditions are most vulnerable to COVID-19, so take extra measures to protect them, says Dr. Meyer.

5. Dine out carefully

Although many restaurants offer outdoor dining, which experts say is the safer option, a recent CDC study showed that adults with COVID-19 infections were twice as likely to have visited a restaurant in the two weeks preceding their illness than those without an infection. 

The study did not distinguish between indoor or outdoor dining, or consider adherence to social distancing and mask use. (Those with COVID-19 infections were more likely to report having dined out at places where few other people were wearing masks or socially distancing.)

“If you are meeting with others at a restaurant and sharing tables while eating, which does not allow for appropriate social distancing and mask use, it provides opportunities for the virus to spread from person to person,” Dr. Ogbuagu notes. “The probability of spreading infection is higher with each additional person you are in contact with, especially when people congregate.”

6. Travel safely

While you should avoid traveling if you can—as the CDC says staying home is the best way to avoid COVID-19—sometimes, it is necessary. But before you leave, you can check to see if the virus is spreading at your destination. More cases at your destination increases your risk of contracting the virus and spreading it to others. You can view each state’s weekly number of cases here  on the CDC web site. 

“Also, don’t forget to check the regulations for quarantining or testing at your destination or for when you return home,” says Dr. Meyer. Whether you are traveling by car, plane, bus, or train, there are precautions you can take along the way. The CDC has a detailed list  of recommendations for each mode of transportation that mostly follows the advice listed above of practicing social distancing, wearing a mask, and washing hands, but also includes specific advice for various scenarios.

7. Get your flu shot

Health officials are concerned about an influx of flu and COVID-19 cases overwhelming hospitals. In the 2018-2019 flu season, 490,600 Americans were hospitalized for the flu, according to the CDC.

Public health experts say this is not the year to skip the flu vaccine. While measures to prevent COVID-19, including mask-wearing, washing hands, and social distancing, can also protect against the flu, the vaccine is especially important—and safe, doctors say.

Though many people claim that the flu shot “gave them the flu,” it is not possible to get infected with the influenza virus from the vaccine itself, Dr. Meyer says. “The vaccine is made up of inactivated virus and is designed to ‘tickle’ the immune system to respond to the real thing when it sees it,” she explains. “The most common side effect from the flu shot is soreness or redness at the site of the injection, which resolves within a day or two.”

The flu vaccine is recommended for everyone 6 months old and up. Talk to your doctor about finding a vaccine near you.

8. Differentiate between flu, colds, and COVID-19

Many people will likely struggle to differentiate between the flu, the common cold, and COVID-19, all of which have similar symptoms.

For example, both COVID-19 and the flu can cause fever, shortness of breath, fatigue, headache, cough, sore throat, runny nose, muscle pain, or body aches, as well as vomiting and diarrhea (though these last two are more common in children). Meanwhile, colds may be milder than the flu and are more likely to involve a runny or stuffy nose. One difference, however, is that COVID-19 is associated with a loss of taste and smell .

So, if you or someone in your family comes down with any of these symptoms, what should you do?

“First, you should stay away from others as much as possible and perform hand washing before you make contact with your face,” Dr. Ogbuagu says. “And certainly go see a doctor or to the hospital if you have serious symptoms, such as a high fever or shortness of breath. Otherwise, getting a COVID-19 test at a testing facility near you would help to define what type of respiratory illness you have and also how to advise people you had been in contact with.”

Parents, Dr. Meyer adds, will need to contact their children’s pediatricians about these symptoms because otherwise their children likely won’t be able to return to school.

“I would also add that people who are older and have underlying medical conditions should have a low threshold to seek care for any of these symptoms,” she says. “Earlier is better, especially for influenza, as we have antiviral medications that work if given within 72 hours of the onset of symptoms.”

9. Seek routine medical care

You should continue to seek any routine or emergency medical care or treatments you need. Many health centers and doctors are offering telehealth appointments (via video or phone) and most have protocols to minimize risk of exposure to the coronavirus.

Getting emergency care when you need it is especially important. Earlier in the pandemic, pediatric and adult physicians reported fewer emergency department visits, leading to a concern that patients were avoiding seeking care due to fears of contracting COVID-19.

“As important as it is to continue to engage in care for known medical issues, there is also a concern that people are falling behind on their preventive healthcare, like getting routine procedures including colonoscopies and pap smears, as well as vaccines,” Dr. Meyer says. “Those other health issues don’t go away just because there is a pandemic. Reach out to your primary care doctor if you’re unsure what you are due to receive.”

10. Be mindful of your mental health

Many people are experiencing anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues during the pandemic as it is a time of stress and uncertainty. All of this is normal, say mental health experts, who recommend that you allow yourself to embrace all emotions, including those that are unpleasant, in order to better manage them.

Experts advise limiting exposure to news if the events of the world are too much right now, practicing mindfulness (even just breathing exercises), eating healthy, and remaining physically active.

For kids, who are still adjusting to a lack of play dates, canceled activities, and different school schedules, parents can help by fully listening to their concerns and providing age-appropriate answers to their questions. By talking with kids about what they know and how they are doing, parents may be able to determine if further emotional support is needed. 

11. Watch your weight

At a time when routines are disrupted and many people are working at home—where snacks are readily available—some may be gaining weight (the so-called quarantine 15). Now more than ever, Yale Medicine doctors recommend that you focus on eating a healthy diet, incorporating regular exercise, getting good sleep, and finding healthy ways to manage stress.

Meanwhile, obesity is emerging as an independent risk factor for severe COVID-19 illness—even among younger patients. One study, which examined hospitalized COVID-19 patients under age 60, found that those with obesity were twice as likely to require hospitalization and even more likely to need critical care than those who did not have it. Given that an estimated 42% of Americans have obesity (having a body mass index equal to or more than 30), this is important.

12. Keep up the good (safety) work

It is likely that COVID-19 will be with us for a while. “But with good efforts to continue to follow the public health measures to protect each other, and, hopefully, a successful vaccine in the future, there is a light at the end of the tunnel,” Dr. Ogbuagu says.

But even before a safe and effective vaccine is available, COVID-19 is a preventable disease, Dr. Meyer points out. “It just requires all of us to do the hard work of practicing the behaviors—described above—to keep our communities safe and healthy.”

Note: Information provided in Yale Medicine articles is for general informational purposes only. No content in the articles should ever be used as a substitute for medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician. Always seek the individual advice of your health care provider with any questions you have regarding a medical condition.   

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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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How the world is combating the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic

| September 30, 2020 | Leave a Comment

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Author(s): Gioietta Juo

Since the beginning of 2020 every aspect of our world has changed in an unrecognizable way.   Over 200 countries have been affected with the COVID-19 virus.   It is in every continent with the exception of the pristine Antarctica.  It is now 8 months,  what have we achieved?    What progress has been made?.   It is now time to take stock of the present situation.   Are we slowly getting out of the pandemic??   What can we expect the future to look like??

DATA ON CORONAVIRUS WORLDWIDE

So far, as of September 19, 2020, the. pandemic has caused 30,906,084 cases of coronavirus  disease with 959,630 deaths [1].

Figure 1  Active Cases in 2020 in millions

Figure 2   Daily New Cases in  2020 in thousands

It is interesting to note that only 6% of death come from the death of otherwise healthy people.   The rest come from those with pre-existing conditions like diabetes, heart and organ weakness and mostly seniors in close contact in places like nursing homes.

Yes,   Every aspect of our lives have changed drastically.  In order to slow the spread of this highly contagious virus, countries have resorted to a drastic lockdown of ordinary social life as we know it. Schools, shops and many work places have closed.  Family is confined to the home.  Those who are lucky can work online at home.  But others have lost their jobs and depend on government subsistence.  But going out means wearing a mask for protection has been mandated.

Even though some countries have slowed down the spread of this virus with social distancing,  keeping away from others by more than 6 ft,   contact tracing and etc,  there are potential down sides.  For a start life is lonely not being able to  see one’s larger family and friends.  Then for those whose marriage is not rock solid, there are emotional risks like child abuse, spouse abuse, drug addictions,  alcoholism,  and various mental problems even suicides.   It has been said that these ills as it  happens are worse than the virus itself!! It is imperative that the degree to which these risks have been realized and studied so that health professionals can then develop strategies by which they can be treated. Financial problems can arise,   this is where governments have come in to help small businesses and personal problems with stimulus. packages.

There is only a limited time we can lead this dreary life.   It is not a permanent solution.  Humans are social creatures, we need to go out,   meet others,   go to schools, have sports, worship in churches and so on……..Most important, schools, the economy cannot be shut down for long.

Now that the season has changed, with the sun beckoning outside, people have the urge to go outside for some fresh air,  To the beaches for those living near the coast,   to the national parks etc .    People cannot be shut indoors forever and it is time to relax the rules.

Most importantly, schools have to open as our children need to go back to their friends and to continue their education.  But how?

Social distancing is still necessary.  The opening of schools has necessitated a certain closeness in living among the young students, leading to many with low grade fever.  In the absence of vaccines what are the solutions?  Online teaching is definitely here to stay even though it puts more stress on the families.  Then there is nerd immunity [2] where a majority of people who have been exposed and acquired immunity for the virus can impart the immunity to the whole community.   That is once a threshold of immune people exist hereby reducing the likelihood of infection  for individuals who lack immunity.  Immure individuals are unlikely to contribute to disease transmission, They disrupt the chain of infection, which stops or slows the spread of the disease.   The greater the proportion of immune individuals in a community, the smaller the probability that that non-immune individuals will come into contact with an immune individual.   However, the basic concepts  of social distancing,   cleanliness of personal hygiene still apply[2].

Definitely, small business – restaurants,  hairdressers,  stores and workplaces which are the backbone of a country’s economy have to open so long as  the basic rules are observed.   Innovative ideas such as using the sidewalk for business have sprung up.

PATH TAKEN BY CROATIA TO COMBAT COVID-19

What is happening is Croatia may be an example of what might come [3].

Figure 3     Active Cases in Croatia in 2020

First comes the main peak of active cases.  After a mandated social distancing and general lockdown,  the number of cases drops drastically.    Now is the time to reopen the society and economy?  However, after some  social mixing, the number of cases rises again.   Another lockdown has to happen.  Again the number of cases drops.  Another attempt of reopening happens followed by an expected rise again of the number of cases.   Each time the number of people catching the disease is expected to be lower,   Several attempts of reopening will happen until the disease is finally eradicated and society gets back to normal.

Having the confidence that the virus has been  licked, the government decided to open up the country completely without restrictions.

This has led to a disastrous sharp rise in new cases in a third wave.  See figures 3 and  4.   In fact what we are seeing is the second wave   followed by the third wave.     Not many countries in the world have seen such pronounced multiple waves.     Spain is now seeing the second wave.  There are signs that the USA is on its second wave.

Figure 4  Daily New Cases in Croatia

TREATMENTS FOR COVID-19 [4]

Although there is no product approved by the US FDA there are many drugs being tested and used.  Remdesivir  may be prescribed for emergency use. Otherwise the following are actively being tested:

• Antivirial drugs

In addition to Remdesivir, there are favipiravir and merimepodib.

–    Dexamethasone

It is a corticosteroid  anti – inflammatory drug studied to treat or prevent organ dysfunction and lung injury from inflammation. With people on ventilators or supplemental oxygen. This can reduce death by 30 %.

• Anti- inflammatory therapy

This is in general useful for more severe cases

• I mmune – based therapy[4]

This is a developing therapy which has been found to be highly effective. Recently the US Food and Drug Administration has issued emergency use authorization to treat hospitalized COVID-19 patients with convalescent plasma from people who have recovered from the virus.  Convalescent plasma is the liquid portion of the blood that contains the antibodies an individual develops in response to an infection and can be given to patients currently fighting that virus. This treatment has long been a part of the infectious disease arsenal.  It has already been in use for COVID-19 for a number of months: The Mayo Clinic has run an “expanded access program for convalescent plasma since March, and more than 70,000 people have received the treatment.   It is found that there is a 35% improvement in mortality rate for COVID-19 patients given the plasma.

• Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine.

  This is a long standing anti -malarial drug which has been used for nearly a century. However, there is a fraction of the medical community which maintain this is not an effective solution.  In fact there are many people who have used it for long periods just for the prevention of malaria. For them no ill effects have been observed.   So this has led to an almost political dialogue. Some say it may cause heart problems but otherwise it has been widely used across all continents with no serious effects.

• Ventilators and oxygen supplements may be used for breathing

VACCINES FOR COVID-19 [5]

It is only natural that we resort to a universal vaccine to solve the pandemic problem.  But the scale of the problem given the population size of each country is gigantic.  More than 150 companies are desperately competing working drastically to produce a vaccine by the end of 2020.  Following are the prominent candidates but which will succeed?

The basic idea of all those vaccines is to instruct one’s immune system to mount a defense, which is sometimes stronger than what would be provided through natural infection and hopefully comes with fewer health consequences.

To do so,  some vaccines use the whole coronavirus, but in a killed or weakened state.  Others use only part of the virus – whether protein or a fragment.  Some transfer the protein into a different virus.

Finally some use pieces of the virus’s genetic material  so as to temporarily make the right proteins to stimulate the immune system.

Even when a vaccine has been chemically produced,  it faces still a tortuous path to the final usable product.  Vaccines have to go through a multi – stage clinical trial process. First phase starts by checking for their safety and whether they trigger an immune response to a small group of healthy individuals.  Second phase finds a wider group of those who are likely to catch the virus and to gauge how effective it is. The third phase expands the group to thousands of people to make sure it is safe and effective, given that the immune response varies by age, ethnicity or underlying health conditions.

It then goes to various regulatory agencies for approval. This may take years.

Following are some of the prominent companies.   There is much in common between the various companies.  Most use the SARS-CoV2 protein to trigger the immune response

== Moderna Therapeutics

Name: mRNA-1273

DNA is the gene and ~RNA gives instructions for certain proteins.  A mRNA vaccine is the instruction for the SARS-CoV2 protein.  Once inside the cell, the protein is made and that triggers the immune response

Who: A Massachusetts-based biotech company, in collaboration with the US National Institutes of Health.

This vaccine candidate relies on injecting snippets of a virus’s genetic material, in this case mRNA, into human cells. They create viral proteins that mimic the coronavirus, training the immune system to recognize its presence.

STATUS:  The third phase has started in a deal with the Swiss company  Lonza.  It is hoped to manufacture up to one billion doses a year.

Name: BNT162b2

WHO :    One of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, based in New York  in collaboration with German biotech BioNTech.

WHAT: Also an mRNA vaccine based on cancer vaccine.

STATUS :  Currently combining phase 2 and 3 on a diverse population in 30,000 people from 39 US states and from Brazil, Argentina, and Germany. Hope to supply 1.3 billion doses by end of 2021.

== University of Oxford

Name: ChAdOx1 nCoV-19

Who: The U.K. university in collaboration with  AstraZeneca.

What: Oxford’s candidate is what’s known as a viral vector vaccine, essentially a “Trojan horse ” presented to the immune system. Oxford’s research team has transferred the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein—which helps the coronavirus invade cells—into a weakened version of an adenovirus, which typically causes the common cold. When this adenovirus is injected into humans, the hope is that the spike protein will trigger an immune response. AstraZeneca and Oxford plan to produce a billion doses of vaccine that they’ve agreed to sell at cost.

Status: Preliminary results from this candidate’s first two clinical trial phases revealed that the vaccine had triggered a strong immune response—including increased antibodies and responses from T-cells—with only minor side effects such as fatigue and headache. It has now moved into phase three of clinical trials, aiming to recruit up to 50,000 volunteers in Brazil, the UK, USA and South Africa.

Recently it has been found that one volunteer in the test phase of  AstreZeneca has contracted inflammation of the spine.    It is not known whether this is related to the vaccine or an independent coincidence.    So the whole test phase has been put on hold until further investigation.

==. Sinovac

Name: CoronaVac

Who: A Chinese biopharmaceutical company, in collaboration with Brazilian research center Butantan.

What: CoronaVac is an inactivated vaccine, meaning it uses a non-infectious version of the coronavirus. While inactivated pathogens can no longer produce disease, they can still provoke an immune response, such as with the annual influenza vaccine.

Status: On July 3, Brazil’s regulatory agency granted this vaccine candidate approval to move ahead to phase three, as it continues to monitor the results of the phase two clinical trials.  The first phases have so far shown that the vaccine does produce an immune response with no severe adverse effects. Preliminary results of this candidate’s earlier testing in macaque monkeys, published in Science , revealed that the vaccine produced antibodies that neutralized 10 strains of SARS-CoV-2. Phase three will recruit nearly 9,000 healthcare professionals in Brazil.

==  Sinopharm

Who: China’s state-run pharmaceutical company, in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products.  Wuhan Institute is where the virus initially started.   There has been much resentment outside China, especially in the US, that China initially limited the movement of people from Wuhan but failed to let travelers go outside internationally.    In this way the virus took hold in Europe and then in USA.  The spread of the virus all over the world has led to countless cases and deaths.    Not to mention the economic and social disruption it has caused the whole world,    China should be made accountable for the gigantic disruption and suffering  it has caused to the whole planet!

What: Sinopharm is also using an inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine that it hopes will reach the public by the end of 2020 . Sinopharm has reported that early trials of its vaccine candidate triggered a strong neutralizing antibody response in participants, with no serious adverse effects.

Status: In mid-July, Sinopharm launched its phase three trial among 15,000 volunteers—aged 18 to 60, with no serious underlying conditions—in the United Arab Emirates. The company selected the UAE , as it has a diverse population with approximately 200 different nationalities, making it an ideal testing ground.

==. Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

Name: Bacillus Calmette-Guerin BRACE trial

Who: The largest child health research institute in Australia, in collaboration with the University of Melbourne.

What: For nearly a hundred years, the Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine has been used to prevent tuberculosis by exposing patients to a small dose of live bacteria . Evidence has emerged over the years that this vaccine may boost the immune system and help the body fight off other diseases as well. Researchers are investigating whether these benefits may also extend to SARS-CoV-2,

Status:  This trial has reached phase three in Australia.   It has begun a series of randomized controlled trials that will test whether BCG might work on the coronavirus as well. They aim to recruit 10,000 healthcare workers in the study.

==. CanSino Biologics

Name: Ad5-nCoV

Who: A Chinese biopharmaceutical company.

What: CanSino has also developed a viral vector vaccine, using a weakened version of the adenovirus as a vehicle for introducing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to the body. Preliminary results from phase two trials have shown that the vaccine produces “significant immune responses in the majority of recipients after a single immunization.” There were no serious adverse reactions documented.

Status: Though the company is still technically in phase two of its trial, on June 25, CanSino became the first company to receive limited approval to use its vaccine in people. The Chinese government has approved the vaccine for military use only, for a period of one year.

==. The Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology

Name: Sputnik V

Who: This is the only Russian  vaccine research institution which is in collaboration with the state-run Russian Direct Investment Fund.

What: Gamaleya has developed a viral vector vaccine that also uses a weakened version of the common cold-causing adenovirus to introduce the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to the body. This vaccine uses two strains of adenovirus, and it requires a second injection after 21 days to boost the immune response. Russia has not published any data from its clinical trials, but officials with the institute state that they have completed phases one and two. The researchers also claim the vaccine produced strong antibody and cellular immune responses.

Status: Despite the lack of published evidence, Russia has cleared the Sputnik V vaccine for widespread use and claimed it as the first registered COVID-19 vaccine on the market. Russia reports that it will start phase three clinical trials on August 12 ; the World Health Organization, however, lists the Sputnik V vaccine as being in phase one of clinical trials.

Even when a vaccine is approved,  there is the problem of manufacturing, distribution, scaling up of the production and deciding who should get it first.    Many vaccines go through the 4th phase of regular study.  This can take long time.   Then what about the cost?  The US government has pledged $10 billion with Pfizer to develop 300 million doses by beginning of 2021,  And World Health Organization, WHO, is aiming to deliver 2 billion doses by the end of 2021.   It is truly a worldwide effort in the race to produce vaccines to fight and eradicate the pandemic.   The companies  are located  in Australia, Russia, Germany, Brazil, Switzerland, UK, USA and of course China.  We hope that the ingenuity of the world’s brilliant scientists and technicians  as well as the experience and  organized know how of our governments and social systems will lead us through this pandemic by the end of 2020.

Gioietta Kuo, MA at Cambridge, PhD in nuclear physics, Atlas Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford and Princeton University plasma physics lab, is a research physicist. Over 70 professional articles and over 100 articles in environmental problems – in World Future Society-wfs.org, amcips.org, MAHB Stanford and other worldwide think tanks. Also in Chinese in ‘ People’s Daily’ and ‘World Environment’ – Magazine of the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection, and others in China. She can be reached at < [email protected] .>

[1] Coronavirus Update (Live): 23,272,847 Cases and 805,907 … https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/  

[2] Herd immunity and COVID-19 (coronavirus): What you need to … https://www.mayoclinic.org/herd-immunity-and-coronavirus/art-20486808

[3] Croatia Coronavirus: 7,900 Cases and 170 Deaths …

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/croatia/

[4]  FDA Authorizes Convalescent Plasma As Emergency … https://www.capradio.org/news/npr/story?storyid=905277083 1 day ago … https://www.capradio.org/news/npr/story?storyid=905277083 1 day ago …

[5] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/expert-answers/coronavirus-drugs

COVID-19 (coronavirus) drugs: Are there any that work …

[6]  CORONAVIRUS UPDATE: Here’s what you should know about the vaccines in development

National Geographic 2020

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/health-and-human-body/human-diseases/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker-how-they-work-latest-developments-cvd/

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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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Adam Rogers

The Perfect Strategy to Fight Covid-19 Is … Everything?

The pandemic has changed—and it’s worse than ever.

Cases of Covid-19 are spiking in nearly every state. The statistics are grim. With more than 100,000 new cases and 2,000 deaths every day, hospital intensive care units are filling up everywhere. It’s an entire country of New-Yorks-in-April. And yet Covid skepticism—over how to fight the disease, and sometimes even the reality of the disease itself—remains a hallmark of right-wing politics.

Read all of our coronavirus coverage here .

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel—vaccines may well be available to millions of people before the end of the year. That’s a scientific triumph, to be sure, but meanwhile, we’re still in the tunnel. Manufacturing and distribution challenges mean that it’ll take until at least June 2021 to vaccinate everyone, according to the head of logistics for the government’s vaccine-goosing Operation Warp Speed program. Until then, the same public health measures that slow the spread of the virus—curve-flattening “non-pharmaceutical interventions” like mask-wearing and canceling gatherings—remain the only tools in the toolbox.

So policymakers and leaders have a stark choice: Force everyone, again, to abide by effective but potentially onerous public health measures, or let hundreds of thousands of people die. It’s a tougher choice than it sounds. Anti-“lockdown” rhetoric and a year of stress has ground people down emotionally and nuked the economy. Plus, it’s a basic tenet of public health that abstinence enjoinders and shame don’t work . If curve-bending efforts aren’t politically and socially viable, they’ll fail—and hundreds of thousands of people will die. As Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization Health Emergencies Programme, said at a press conference last Friday: “Those countries currently in the fight of their lives, you have got to stick with this. You’ve got to try and control this transmission, or your health systems will not be able to cope.”

What you’d really like to know here is which specific interventions give the most bang for the buck, the greatest reduction in disease transmission with the lightest possible touch on the social fabric and the economy. Is it … a mask mandate? Closing bars and restaurants? Closing schools? Temperature checks at building entrances? It would be very, very good to know this, because all of those things have benefits, but also costs. But scientists and public health experts don’t have answers. They know these things work in the aggregate, but not how they overlap and synergize, how behaviors change in response to new rules, and how politics and sociology affect adherence.

That’s why nothing seems to make sense today—indoor dining open, places of worship closed; outdoor playgrounds closed, gyms open; outdoor dining areas open then closed; curfews implemented on bars. In many countries, early measures combined with financial support and rigorous testing, tracing, and isolation programs squashed the disease. The US and Europe did some of the first thing and almost none of the others, dooming those places to a bloody oscillation: Cases spike, lockdowns come, economies and mental health crash, places reopen, cases spike, repeat. And now, well, we are where we are.

In the initial months of the pandemic, everybody blew it. “Ideally, you want interventions that have maximal effectiveness with the least social and economic downside,” says Lawrence Gostin, director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. “That’s the rational way of doing it. But there’s been no rationality around fighting this pandemic, particularly in the United States and Europe.”

David Kushner

Andy Greenberg

David Gilbert

Emily Mullin

Public health experts know, in the broadest terms, what measures will bend the curve, but the science of it is really more of an art. Every country around the world rolled out roughly similar sets of public health interventions to fight Covid-19 in roughly the same order, at roughly the same moments in their encounters with the disease. According to research led by Thomas Hale at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford, most countries started communicating to their citizens in February about the potential problems to come, and instituted border controls even before they had confirmed cases. About 25 days later, in mid-March, countries started canceling public events and closing schools, and then closing workplaces five days after that. Four days after that, on average, came stay-at-home orders and public transportation closures—lockdowns.

The total portfolio of interventions is familiar, and taken in total they’re still the best and only way to reduce Covid-19’s spread—that portfolio is the basis for new, sweeping recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example. But nobody studied those measures closely to see what was working. “I think there has been a missed opportunity to learn from the first-wave experiences,” says Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong who has tried to assess interventions for Covid-19 and other outbreaks. “A lot of interventions were applied, natural experiments in different places, and it’s been a missed opportunity not to study those more carefully to see what happened, what worked, and what didn’t.”

Take mask-wearing. I’m not going to focus too much on that here, because so many smart reporters already have, and because widespread mask-wearing clearly cuts transmission of Covid-19. But just consider how hard it is to really-and-for-truly test that proposition. It’s possible to, for example, test how well masks reduce the emission of the aerosolized particles that seem to be a major contributor to the spread of the virus. You can also compare places with mask mandates to places without and see what the virus does. In Kansas , for example, counties that put a mask mandate in place last summer saw Covid-19 incidence decline; counties that didn’t mandate masks saw incidence increase. The same correlation held in Germany; regions with mask mandates for transit and shops saw reductions in cases while non-mandate regions did not, leading researchers there to conclude that 20 days after mask mandates go into force, infections go down by about 45 percent.

That’s great, and those new CDC guidelines are all-in on masking, recommending people wear them everywhere other than their household, including indoors. President-elect Joe Biden told CNN that he’ll ask all citizens to wear masks for the first 100 days of his term—quite the turn from Donald Trump’s derisive attitude . Mask not what your country can do for you, I guess.

But mask studies still have some gaps. Was it really the masks themselves blocking enough virus emitted from the mouth and nose? That’s almost certainly true, but what if the population-scale effect of masking also includes more subtle effects? “Mask mandates usually arise when cases are rising. Does a mask mandate reduce transmission because masks actually stop transmission by blocking virus when we breathe out, or because wearing masks reminds us that there is a pandemic going on, and we don't socialize?” says A. Marm Kilpatrick, an infectious disease researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “Or, are masks completely irrelevant and the decrease in transmission that sometimes follows mask wearing is just because people were freaked out by news reports of cases rising? Disentangling these effects is extremely difficult.” It’d be good to know those things, if for no other reason than to be able to convince people to wear their damn masks.

A gold-standard, randomized controlled trial of mask use would answer these questions—you’d think. A recent Danish study attempted that. One group of people got told to wear masks outside their homes, and another group didn’t. According to the study, masks didn’t really help; the reduction in Covid-19 infections wasn’t significant. But as other analysts have written, the study wasn’t enforcing actual mask wearing. So it wasn’t actually a study of masks versus no masks; it was a study of the effect of telling people to wear masks. If anything, it was a study of mask mandates, not mask effectiveness. Even the lead author acknowledged that it didn’t really say anything about whether masks worked. And it wasn’t really a gold-standard trial. For one thing, it’s impossible to blind which people were doing masks or no-masks. For another, the study didn’t actually isolate the thing it set out to test.

Actually isolating the right variable and getting statistical power out of a double-blinded RCT on masks would be nearly impossible. “Doing a mask RCT with 30,000 people would be very, very challenging, and one would need to somehow measure mask usage, since a substantial fraction of people wouldn't wear their mask all the time,” Kilpatrick says.

Masks are relatively cheap, and mask mandates are relatively easy to implement—especially if you’re not trying to put any power of enforcement behind them, like fines. Harder, society-level interventions with bigger economic and social implications are even tougher to study.

People have tried. When you can’t run an RCT, you have to be satisfied with natural experiments, observational and retrospective analyses, and computer models. In mid-November, The New York Times correlated Hale’s Oxford countermeasure data for US states with the extents of their outbreaks—new cases per 100,000 people and hospitalizations per 100,000 people. Sure enough, the states with the fewest and least potent restrictions—North Dakota and South Dakota, it turned out—had the worst outbreaks. Hawaii’s rules were the most stringent, and the state had the fewest cases.

That analysis makes intuitive sense, and it supports the everything-all-at-once strategy. But it isn’t perfect. Time plays a role here—tests were hard to come by early in the pandemic, which means states could have had thousands of cases that went undetected. Hawaii is a lot easier to keep potentially infected travelers away from than, say, Iowa or Kansas, so maybe the Aloha state had fewer patient zeroes to begin with.

Just a couple of days before the Times analysis, the journal Nature Human Behaviour published another attempt at developing a heuristic for non-pharmaceutical interventions. An international team led by Austrian network scientists looked at the rise of nearly 7,000 different countermeasures in March and April in 79 different countries. They found a pattern similar to the one that Hale’s team discovered. But then things got tricky. “Many countries implemented bunches of measures simultaneously, and this is statistically challenging, because if you have 10 interventions implanted the same day, it’s hard to disentangle the effects,” says Peter Klimek, a data scientist at the Medical University of Vienna who led the research. “And these individual interventions are closely related to each other. You can’t shut down schools without shutting down other areas of life in parallel. There is no such thing as the effectiveness of a single intervention.”

Klimek’s team tried anyway. They looked at the kinds of interventions that the countries ran and their concurrent reductions, if any, in the effective reproduction number, R t —how fast the disease moves from person to person. Then the team ran four different kinds of analyses: They ran a complex regression model, basically comparing countries with specific interventions to countries that didn’t do the same thing; a time-series regression that assumed the interventions had specific effects they could find in the numbers; and a couple of machine-learning algorithms to look for patterns, too. (They also tried to build in ways to account for socioeconomic and political differences in the countries themselves.) “For some measures, these four different methods gave us completely different results. But there was a core of interventions on which they could agree,” Klimek says, “where they were implementing a measure and observing a reduction of the effective reproduction number.”

The winners? The most effective move was canceling small gatherings like weddings and parties, and closing shops, bars, and restaurants. Number two: school closures, which is controversial because Covid-19 seems to spread differently among younger kids, and because closing schools has all kinds of knock-on effects—developmental impact on kids, forcing caregivers to stay home as well. Klimek says his team saw hints in their data that closing high schools was more effective than closing elementary schools in terms of reducing disease transmission.

Making sure that health care facilities had enough personal protective equipment was number three, and good communication strategies were number four. Airport restrictions also helped, but only if countries put them in place in the very early days of the pandemic (so no help there, really). Mask-wearing showed up in some of the statistical approaches but not all, and might be subsumed in some of the other broad descriptors, like social distancing.

The losers? Improvements in testing and tracing didn’t seem to help—maybe because they weren’t implemented soon enough or at grand enough scale. Closing intracity public transit didn’t move the needle, either. “These are just not places where a lot of transmission happened,” Klimek says.

But as appealing as this assessment might seem, it’s not straightforward. All of those “winners” that Klimek laid out might (or might not) be part of a “lockdown” or stay-at-home order like the ones coming into force in California. Instituting one or several might enhance or limit the effects of others. “The measures do not associate in a linear way. They overlap partly,” Klimek says. On the plus side, that means removing a single intervention from the set doesn’t necessarily knock over the whole Jenga tower. Places could open schools, for example, but keep bars and restaurants closed and prohibit small gatherings, and still get a good effect. Maybe. “We’re starting to see this in many European countries,” Klimek says. “It’s not only black and white. We can do this now in a more differentiated way.”

It’s a good thought, and Klimek is working with the Austrian government to put it into effect. It’s also not clear-cut. “I’d caution you that regression analysis and modeling are very unreliable,” Gostin says. “You really need to do rigorous retrospective analyses to try to figure out what works and what doesn’t, which we’ve never really done.”

Worse, though, as the paper itself acknowledges, when it comes to population-level public health interventions during a crisis, subtext is everything. It’s the unmeasured changes in people’s behavior that confound work like Klimek’s, the second-order consequences of the rules—like caregivers staying home because their kids don’t have school to go to. If the government doesn’t subsidize staying home, let’s say, those people could lose their jobs, which crushes their finances and harms the overall economy. So school closures don’t “work,” as such, without all kinds of other supporting efforts. “When we think about other NPIs, like school closures, the effect of that kind of intervention could vary from one place to another,” Cowling says. “So I don’t think it’s possible to have an estimate of the effect of school closures on Covid. You could have the effect of school closures on Covid in April 2020 in the UK—in a particular place, at a particular time, with an intervention described in a certain way.”

That means research like Klimek’s faces a huge task in trying to disentangle what public health rules say from what they actually do. “What they are actually measuring is the direct effect of these interventions, plus the indirect effect of these interventions, plus the direct and indirect effects of other things happening at the same time,” Kilpatrick says. “None of the papers I’ve seen tries to quantify media coverage of local epidemics, even though I'd bet that's one of the largest effects on peoples’ behavior.”

(It does seem to be true that perception of the seriousness of the pandemic changes how people respond to it. Simple perception of the threat—understanding that Covid-19 is dangerous—makes people more willing to comply with interventions, or more cautious overall, and so indirectly reduces R t , or infections or death rates. This, too, makes intuitive sense. People who hear that their local hospitals are full or have Facebook feeds full of posts from sick friends and relatives might be more likely to simply stay home. In one model —so, caveats apply—a greater awareness of Covid-19 deaths reduced, in the short term, death rates overall. I tried to hint at this a little more bluntly last April, in a story that tried to figure out how many people would have to die of Covid-19 in the United States before everyone knew at least one person, and so might be more open to behavioral interventions. It turns out to be a harder math problem than it sounds, but the range was between about 500,000 and 1.6 million people, which seemed much less possible nine months ago than it does today.)

And the converse might be true too. Maybe people who don’t buy it, who get their information from sources that downplay Covid-19 or think that a laissez-faire herd-immunity strategy would work ( it wouldn’t ), might not respond to any interventions. They’d put themselves at risk, and since Covid-19 has significant transmission by people who have no symptoms , put others at risk as well. That could look like the intervention itself was failing, when the real problem was compliance, or lack of synergistic effects with other subtler, cautious behaviors. So which thing actually cut R t ?

No, seriously, I’m asking. Because no one really knows.

Even worse, different places and conditions might lessen or increase how well Covid-19 spreads. It’s “spatiotemporally heterogenous,” meaning the disease moves in spikes through populations, with super-spreading events having a disproportionate effect on where and when it crops up. One study , from researchers in Canada and England in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in September, even hypothesized that different interventions would affect the reproductive number differently at different kinds of events—smaller or larger, longer or shorter, and so on. The trick is knowing which kind of event you’re at, and getting people there to believe they should do the safest thing.

A catastrophic year of inconsistencies has led, in the US, to millions of sick people, a quarter million deaths, and mounting frustration. Even influential public health voices, like former White House Covid-19 task force leader Scott Atlas, seemed to be arguing for a “herd immunity” strategy that involved letting everyone get sick and hoping for the best. If nothing seems to work, why bother trying?

Of course, it’s not that nothing works. It’s that everything does, a model that some public-health-minded scientists liken to stacking slices of Swiss cheese . Layer enough of them, and all the holes get blocked. The sum is greater than the holes of the parts.

If the government wants people to keep building cheese barriers (if you see what I mean), the cheese has to come with social and financial support for staying home, for wearing masks—money to keep businesses and homes together until the pandemic ends—and clear, transparent communication from officials (and maybe some famous people, too) to explain what’s going on and why. None of that has happened. “The most effective interventions are population-wide risk mitigation measures based on changing the public’s risk profiles. That’s why the United States has failed so abysmally—because very simple behavioral mitigations have become politicized,” Gostin says.

Back in April I wrote that the point of communal public health measures was to hold the line , to keep cases and deaths low, to keep the hospital system from being overwhelmed until research scientists could get us out of this mess. I thought, perhaps naively, it would take months. It took a year, and cases and deaths are worse than they’ve ever been. But we’re almost there—months away from getting a shot that looks likely to stop the pandemic. Holding on is the only option. “It’s not the expressed goal, but that’s the absolute hidden goal,” Gostin says. “That’s literally all we’ve got left. We’ve failed at everything else.” Non-pharmaceutical interventions are the only tools in the toolbox, and they only work if you take them out and use them—even if you don’t know how to use them well. They work, and they’re the only way the country will get from here to the After Times. But it’s going to be a muddle, not a march.

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Beth Mole, Ars Technica

Sachi Mulkey

Matt Reynolds

Rhett Allain

• Open access
• Published: 07 April 2020

Fighting against the common enemy of COVID-19: a practice of building a community with a shared future for mankind

• Xu Qian 1 ,
• Ran Ren 2 ,
• Youfa Wang 3 ,
• Yan Guo 4 ,
• Jing Fang 5 ,
• Zhong-Dao Wu 6 ,
• Pei-Long Liu 4 ,
• Tie-Ru Han 7 &

Members of Steering Committee, Society of Global Health, Chinese Preventive Medicine Association

Infectious Diseases of Poverty volume  9 , Article number:  34 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused more than 80 813 confirmed cases in all provinces of China, and 21 110 cases reported in 93 countries of six continents as of 7 March 2020 since middle December 2019. Due to biological nature of the novel coronavirus, named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) with faster spreading and unknown transmission pattern, it makes us in a difficulty position to contain the disease transmission globally. To date, we have found it is one of the greatest challenges to human beings in fighting against COVID-19 in the history, because SARS-CoV-2 is different from SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV in terms of biological features and transmissibility, and also found the containment strategies including the non-pharmaceutical public health measures implemented in China are effective and successful. In order to prevent a potential pandemic-level outbreak of COVID-19, we, as a community of shared future for mankind, recommend for all international leaders to support preparedness in low and middle income countries especially, take strong global interventions by using old approaches or new tools, mobilize global resources to equip hospital facilities and supplies to protect noisome infections and to provide personal protective tools such as facemask to general population, and quickly initiate research projects on drug and vaccine development. We also recommend for the international community to develop better coordination, cooperation, and strong solidarity in the joint efforts of fighting against COVID-19 spreading recommended by the joint mission report of the WHO-China experts, against violating the International Health Regulation (WHO, 2005), and against stigmatization, in order to eventually win the battle against our common enemy — COVID-19.

A sudden outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus has happened since December 2019 in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, a central city in the People’s Republic of China, where transportation is enormously convenient to connecting all other places in China and overseas [ 1 , 2 ]. As of 7 March, 2020, a total of 80 813 confirmed cases reported in all provinces of China, and 21 110 cases reported in 93 countries/territories/areas of six continents [ 3 ]. In particular, some cases have been confirmed in African countries, such as Algeria, Egypt, and Nigeria [ 3 ]. This is the biggest infectious disease outbreak in China ever since 1949, the year of founding the People’s Republic of China. It is the biggest battle since the disease is spreading so fast with high prevalence, and the prevention of the transmission has involved all people in the country [ 4 ]. While at global level, the strategy and coordinating mechanism to control COVID-19 need to be set down as soon as possible [ 5 ], in particular, three questions need to be addressed as (i) how to take the emergency response actions effectively in different countries? (ii) how to mobilize resources quickly with strategic ways? and (iii) how to encourage people proactively and orderly to participate in this battle against COVID-19 from different regions of the world?

Lessons from the battle against COVID-19 in China

In order to address three aforementioned questions, the lessons from China in the battle against COVID-19 need to be understood clearly in the following three aspects:

Traditional epidemiological approaches effectively control the transmission

Professionally speaking, three steps are necessary to taken once an infectious disease outbreaks in certain regions, including controlling infectious sources, blocking the transmission routes, and protecting the susceptive population [ 6 ]. While, as COVID-19 spreading so fast and people’s travelling so frequent during the Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) season, it cannot control effectively if only taking the normal or general countermeasures [ 7 ]. Therefore, the Chinese government has quickly taken actions to contain its transmission inside China, including detecting the disease early, diagnosis and reporting early, isolating and treatment of cases early, tracing all possible contacts, persuading people to stay at home, and promoting social distancing measures commensurate with the risk, etc., based on the current knowledge about epidemiological features and transmission patterns of COVID-19.

Response strategies coping with local conditions

In dealing with the outbreak, China has been adopting the way of tailoring interventions into local settings, from quickly finding each infected person, tracing close contacts and placing them under quarantine, to promoting basic hygiene measures to the public, such as frequent hand washing, cancelling public gathering, closing schools, extending the Spring Festival holiday, delaying return to work, and to the most severe measure of city lockdown of Wuhan [ 8 , 9 ]. By adapting response strategies to the local context, it may avoid blockading the city when it is not needed, and also prevent from a major outbreak without taking any action.

Mobilizing resources quickly to support the emergency responses

Under the strong leadership of the Central Government of China, the mobilization for the emergency responses has been effectively promoted in following ways. Firstly, a Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council has established involving 32 Ministries, with subgroups on control of outbreak, medical rescue, scientific research, information and communication, international cooperation, logistics, and frontline coordination [ 10 ]. This multi-sectoral cooperation mechanism at high level is to ensure the facilities and supplies have been well arranged to support the emergency responses in all provinces, with focus on the Hubei Province, for example, more than 10 mobile hospitals and two big hospitals with each one having the capacity of holding more than 1000 beds have been built within 10 days. Secondly, more than 40 000 medical professionals from other provinces or military institutions have been dispatched to Hubei Province to implement emergency responses, including medical care and treatment, epidemiological investigations, environmental sterilization for disinfection, and data and information management to support the policy making.

Encouraging people proactively and orderly participate in this battle against COVID-19

It is important to protect the community from exposure to the infection, all residents in the potential risk areas were encouraged to stay at home, which is an effective way to block the transmission routes. Local community health workers and volunteers, after the specific training, proactively participate in screening the suspicious infections, and help in implementing proper quarantine measures by providing support services, such as driving patients to the mobile hospitals [ 8 ]. All those activities logistically managed at the community level.

At the same time, from medical care side, the medical doctors and nurses worked very hard in the hospitals, to screen the suspected cases, provide medical care for the confirmed cases, and taking emergency response to rescue severe patients to reduce the fatality. While epidemiologists working in centers for disease control and preventions provided the statistical results for the dissemination of epidemiological data correctly, and provide the well-prepared datasets for the decision makers for coordination of necessary resources, and many health workers investigate the suspected contactors for quick medical quarantine of the suspected cases at the community level.

Preventing the pandemic of COVID-19

With the conceptualization on building a community with a shared future for mankind proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 [ 11 ], Chinese people have taken following actions to prevent the pandemic of the diseases: (i) sharing the sequences of SARS-Cov-2 virus with the World Health Organization (WHO) and other countries which are important information for other countries to prepare the tests for screening and diagnosis, (ii) all epidemiological data with clinical treatment in China has been published in the international journals, (iii) prevent spreading of the disease by traveling ban in Wuhan, (iv) medical quarantine has been performed for all suspected contactors, (v) body temperature measuring facilities were equipped in all railway stations and airports, etc. In order to take very strict contain measures for COVID-19 outbreak tailored to local settings, the travelling ban was executed in Wuhan, and encouraging no gathering and less travelling in other cities out of Hubei Province. Those actions were implemented by strong coordinating of the Chinese government in cooperation with local residents. To date, the epidemiological data has showed more than thousands of people have been protected from the infections, and increasing pattern of the transmission has been suppressed significantly in China [ 12 ].

Challenges in fighting against COVID-19

The fighting against COVID-19 has been lasting almost two months, and the time left for people outside of China to prepare the countermeasures has been narrowed quickly. To date, we have found it is one of the greatest challenges to human beings in fighting against COVID-19 in the history, since the pathogen of SARS-CoV-2 is a new coronavirus, differed from either SARS-CoV or MERS-CoV in terms of biological characteristics and transmissibility [ 13 ].

Technically, we have little knowledge on the pathogen and pathogenesis, without specific effectively drugs or vaccine against the virus infection, which cause difficulties in rescuing the severe cases which account for about 20% of the infections. The transmission routes are not clear enough, although we currently understand that the respiratory transmission from human to human is the major transmission route, but other ways for transmission, such as gastrointenstinal transmission or aerosol propagation, is not so clear.

Administratively, implementing the locked down measures in such a big city with over 15 millions of people is not an easy task, with a lot of preparing works from different dimensions of municipal logistic management, to support the emergency response actions. Thus, the multi-administrative systems need to be coordinated collectively, guiding from the central government, with more resources gathering from various places all over the country.

Globally, the information sharing is so important, including patients’ information sharing to trace the suspected cases to protect more people as quickly as possible, genome sequences information sharing to prepare the diagnostics as quickly as possible, and treatment schemes sharing to rescue more severe cases. The WHO declared the Public Health Emergency of International Concern based on the International Health Regulation (2005) in the early time of the outbreak of COVID-19, as it is an extraordinary event to constitute a public health risk to the states through the international spread of disease, and to potentially require a coordinate international response [ 14 ]. All actions to strengthen surveillance and response systems on infectious diseases need to put emphasis on resources limited countries, such as Southeast Asia and African countries [ 15 ].

Recommendations

With understanding more about the nature of COVID-19, it is necessary to understand clearly the current challenges against COVID-19 become increasing, not only to China but also to the world. In order to take quick actions to early prepare the battle against COVID-19 and better allocate enough health resources from the world, the recommendations are as follows:

Coordinating interventions and resources mobilization globally

Preparedness in low and middle income countries.

WHO has identified 13 African countries at the top-risk affected by COVID-19 but with limited resources against COVID-19, including Algeria, Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. These countries have direct links or greater numbers of people travelling to/from China [ 15 ]. The preparing works on response to the imported cases need initiated as soon as possible with the assistance of WHO as well as developed world. The major preparing works are to prepare enough facilities for use in hospitals, such as test kits, facemasks, and personal protective equipment (PPE), to prepare the quarantine measures in each gate of the traveling venues, and to prepare information communication, etc. The emergency response mechanism on multi-sectoral cooperation needs to be established once the first case has been detected.

Intervention and coordination globally

The fast spreading of COVID-19 to more than 90 countries/territories, with some cluster cases occurred in a few countries, demonstrated that this new disease has higher transmissibility compared with SARS and MERS. The nature of high transmissibility for COVID-19 requires us to (i) prepare the battle globally as soon as possible, by taking the advantage of the time window opened by Chinese battle against COVID-19, (ii) invest more weapons or tools against the diseases by better global coordination, and (iii) take proper quarantine measures globally [ 16 ]. We are able to win the battle only if our actions are coordinated better at a global level.

Resources mobilization globally

One of lessons learnt from the battle in Wuhan is the speed of resources gathering against COVID-19 outbreak could not catch up the speed of the coronavirus spreading in early stage of the outbreak, and it is in need of support or assistances from outside of epicenter, including medical doctors, nurses, and facilities of PPE used in hospitals, and facemasks for residents. The strong support from outside of epicenter quickly to ensure all infectious sources either controlled through quarantine measures or treated in the specialized hospitals. Therefore, for those countries with weak health system, it is so urgent to get help from other parts of the world. WHO needs to mobilize its certified global emergency medical teams to get ready to be dispatched to other countries where health workers are in short supply while an outbreak occurs.

Jointly fighting against common enemy ─ COVID-19

As said by WHO Director-General in the news press on Public Health Emergency of International Concern declaration that “this declaration is not a vote of no confidence in China, our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems.” Therefore, international community needs to work together to prepare for the containment of COVID-19 transmission and spreading in other countries, under the scenario that more countries may be affected by the new coronavirus [ 17 ]. These containment works have to quickly take readiness on active surveillance, early detection, isolation and case management, contact tracing and prevention of onward spread of COVID-19.

Therefore, at this stage, with more countries having confirmed more and more COVID-19 cases, all countries need work together on the following global actions on:

fighting against COVID-19 spreading, including sharing the information of the disease transmission and epidemiological knowledge, sharing the experiences on case management and treatment approaches both for severe cases or light symptoms, and sharing new technologies or strategies to contain the transmission;

fighting against violating International Health Regulation, by following the WHO’s authoritative advices which called on all countries to implement decisions that are evidence-based and convincing. We need to improve our quarantine measures to replace the disconnection of international traveling and trade restrictions, with an assistance of the improved active surveillance systems and AI-based technology to trace the contactors;

fighting against stigmatization, since the stigmatization is always present when the disease outbreak and people facing the sudden attack of this kind of epidemic. These phenomena on stigmatization may be at a scale of epicenter areas, or may be at a country and regional scale, and even at global scale. Thus, we need fight with the real and common enemy which is the new coronavirus, rather than the infected people. The international community needs the solidarity and sympathy to start the battle against the common enemy – the new coronavirus, as well as against stigmatization at the same time.

Global cooperation in priority settings

By considering COVID-19 is spreading so fast which causes difficulties in containing the disease, we, as a community of shared future for mankind, need better coordination in global cooperation and further improvement in the multi-sectoral cooperation in order to quickly take response and prevent from the pandemic [ 18 ]. In addition, we also need better coherence of our resources with more international partners, at least, we can quickly improve our priority settings in sharing information and data, on research priority settings, on surveillance and response to outbreaks at a global level.

Cooperation on sharing information and data

In order to quickly share the information and datasets for countermeasures, the actions on fast and open reporting of outbreak data and sharing of virus samples, genetic information, and research results are encouraged for all international communities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as governmental institutions around the world. Through regional and country office of WHO, more preventive information against COVID-19 can be disseminated to the public in the vulnerable countries.

Coordination on surveillance and response

With understanding the importance of human health in the planet, multi-sectoral and multi-lateral cooperation against COVID-19 pandemic are recommended at global level. Particularly, the scientific communities, governments and NGOs in different fields, such as public health, agriculture, ecology, epidemiology, governance planning, science, and many others need to collaboratively prevent future outbreaks, with better coordination. The secretary of the United Nations need take the responsibility to coordinate the actions on protecting the planetary health by systematic approaches, such as EcoHealth, One Health, Planetary Health and Urban Health, and making sure public resources are worthwhile investing in strengthening surveillance and response systems for preventing future outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases.

Coherence on research priority settings

We urgently encourage all governments and international foundation to support short-term and emergency response-related research projects to improve our understanding of the causes, risks, infectiousness, and threats of a pandemic [ 19 ]. Health institutions at international level should be encouraged to organize the research priority settings on preventing the pandemic or averting the emergence of the disease. International conservation organizations start to take investigations on types of wildlife-pathogens interactions affecting human health. International environmental agencies can initiate researches on unsustainable transformations of natural environments and ecosystems that provide life-supporting services for our health.

Conclusions

To summarize, COVID-19 is a new disease that has caused great impacts to the people’s daily life extraordinarily. We, as a community of shared future for mankind, need to take collectively and quickly strong emergency responses as a battle against our common enemy, the new coronavirus, not only in China but also in the world. All partners of international community and country leaders are encouraged to proactively take strategic actions as soon as possible to fight the COVID-19 together. Hard times will end finally, and we will meet each other in the blooming spring soon.

Availability of data and materials

All data supporting the findings of this study are included in the article.

Abbreviations

Coronavirus disease 2019

Novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus

Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus

Non-governmental organizations

World Health Organization

Personal protective equipment

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Qian, X., Ren, R., Wang, Y. et al. Fighting against the common enemy of COVID-19: a practice of building a community with a shared future for mankind. Infect Dis Poverty 9 , 34 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40249-020-00650-1

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Alaka m. basu , amb alaka m. basu professor, department of global development - cornell university, senior fellow - united nations foundation kaushik basu , and kaushik basu nonresident senior fellow - global economy and development @kaushikcbasu jose maria u. tapia jmut jose maria u. tapia student - cornell university.

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This essay is part of “ Reimagining the global economy: Building back better in a post-COVID-19 world ,” a collection of 12 essays presenting new ideas to guide policies and shape debates in a post-COVID-19 world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the inadequacy of public health systems worldwide, casting a shadow that we could not have imagined even a year ago. As the fog of confusion lifts and we begin to understand the rudiments of how the virus behaves, the end of the pandemic is nowhere in sight. The number of cases and the deaths continue to rise. The latter breached the 1 million mark a few weeks ago and it looks likely now that, in terms of severity, this pandemic will surpass the Asian Flu of 1957-58 and the Hong Kong Flu of 1968-69.

Moreover, a parallel problem may well exceed the direct death toll from the virus. We are referring to the growing economic crises globally, and the prospect that these may hit emerging economies especially hard.

The economic fall-out is not entirely the direct outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic but a result of how we have responded to it—what measures governments took and how ordinary people, workers, and firms reacted to the crisis. The government activism to contain the virus that we saw this time exceeds that in previous such crises, which may have dampened the spread of the COVID-19 but has extracted a toll from the economy.

This essay takes stock of the policies adopted by governments in emerging economies, and what effect these governance strategies may have had, and then speculates about what the future is likely to look like and what we may do here on.

Nations that build walls to keep out goods, people and talent will get out-competed by other nations in the product market.

It is becoming clear that the scramble among several emerging economies to imitate and outdo European and North American countries was a mistake. We get a glimpse of this by considering two nations continents apart, the economies of which have been among the hardest hit in the world, namely, Peru and India. During the second quarter of 2020, Peru saw an annual growth of -30.2 percent and India -23.9 percent. From the global Q2 data that have emerged thus far, Peru and India are among the four slowest growing economies in the world. Along with U.K and Tunisia these are the only nations that lost more than 20 percent of their GDP. 1

COVID-19-related mortality statistics, and, in particular, the Crude Mortality Rate (CMR), however imperfect, are the most telling indicator of the comparative scale of the pandemic in different countries. At first glance, from the end of October 2020, Peru, with 1039 COVID-19 deaths per million population looks bad by any standard and much worse than India with 88. Peru’s CMR is currently among the highest reported globally.

However, both Peru and India need to be placed in regional perspective. For reasons that are likely to do with the history of past diseases, there are striking regional differences in the lethality of the virus (Figure 11.1). South America is worse hit than any other world region, and Asia and Africa seem to have got it relatively lightly, in contrast to Europe and America. The stark regional difference cries out for more epidemiological analysis. But even as we await that, these are differences that cannot be ignored.

To understand the effect of policy interventions, it is therefore important to look at how these countries fare within their own regions, which have had similar histories of illnesses and viruses (Figure 11.2). Both Peru and India do much worse than the neighbors with whom they largely share their social, economic, ecological and demographic features. Peru’s COVID-19 mortality rate per million population, or CMR, of 1039 is ahead of the second highest, Brazil at 749, and almost twice that of Argentina at 679.

Similarly, India at 88 compares well with Europe and the U.S., as does virtually all of Asia and Africa, but is doing much worse than its neighbors, with the second worst country in the region, Afghanistan, experiencing less than half the death rate of India.

The official Indian statement that up to 78,000 deaths 2 were averted by the lockdown has been criticized 3 for its assumptions. A more reasonable exercise is to estimate the excess deaths experienced by a country that breaks away from the pattern of its regional neighbors. So, for example, if India had experienced Afghanistan’s COVID-19 mortality rate, it would by now have had 54,112 deaths. And if it had the rate reported by Bangladesh, it would have had 49,950 deaths from COVID-19 today. In other words, more than half its current toll of some 122,099 COVID-19 deaths would have been avoided if it had experienced the same virus hit as its neighbors.

What might explain this outlier experience of COVID-19 CMRs and economic downslide in India and Peru? If the regional background conditions are broadly similar, one is left to ask if it is in fact the policy response that differed markedly and might account for these relatively poor outcomes.

Peru and India have performed poorly in terms of GDP growth rate in Q2 2020 among the countries displayed in Table 2, and given that both these countries are often treated as case studies of strong governance, this draws attention to the fact that there may be a dissonance between strong governance and good governance.

The turnaround for India has been especially surprising, given that until a few years ago it was among the three fastest growing economies in the world. The slowdown began in 2016, though the sharp downturn, sharper than virtually all other countries, occurred after the lockdown.

On the COVID-19 policy front, both India and Peru have become known for what the Oxford University’s COVID Policy Tracker 4 calls the “stringency” of the government’s response to the epidemic. At 8 pm on March 24, 2020, the Indian government announced, with four hours’ notice, a complete nationwide shutdown. Virtually all movement outside the perimeter of one’s home was officially sought to be brought to a standstill. Naturally, as described in several papers, such as that of Ray and Subramanian, 5 this meant that most economic life also came to a sudden standstill, which in turn meant that hundreds of millions of workers in the informal, as well as more marginally formal sectors, lost their livelihoods.

In addition, tens of millions of these workers, being migrant workers in places far-flung from their original homes, also lost their temporary homes and their savings with these lost livelihoods, so that the only safe space that beckoned them was their place of origin in small towns and villages often hundreds of miles away from their places of work.

After a few weeks of precarious living in their migrant destinations, they set off, on foot since trains and buses had been stopped, for these towns and villages, creating a “lockdown and scatter” that spread the virus from the city to the town and the town to the village. Indeed, “lockdown” is a bit of a misnomer for what happened in India, since over 20 million people did exactly the opposite of what one does in a lockdown. Thus India had a strange combination of lockdown some and scatter the rest, like in no other country. They spilled out and scattered in ways they would otherwise not do. It is not surprising that the infection, which was marginally present in rural areas (23 percent in April), now makes up some 54 percent of all cases in India. 6

In Peru too, the lockdown was sudden, nationwide, long drawn out and stringent. 7 Jobs were lost, financial aid was difficult to disburse, migrant workers were forced to return home, and the virus has now spread to all parts of the country with death rates from it surpassing almost every other part of the world.

As an aside, to think about ways of implementing lockdowns that are less stringent and geographically as well as functionally less total, an example from yet another continent is instructive. Ethiopia, with a COVID-19 death rate of 13 per million population seems to have bettered the already relatively low African rate of 31 in Table 1. 8

We hope that human beings will emerge from this crisis more aware of the problems of sustainability.

The way forward

We next move from the immediate crisis to the medium term. Where is the world headed and how should we deal with the new world? Arguably, that two sectors that will emerge larger and stronger in the post-pandemic world are: digital technology and outsourcing, and healthcare and pharmaceuticals.

The last 9 months of the pandemic have been a huge training ground for people in the use of digital technology—Zoom, WebEx, digital finance, and many others. This learning-by-doing exercise is likely to give a big boost to outsourcing, which has the potential to help countries like India, the Philippines, and South Africa.

Globalization may see a short-run retreat but, we believe, it will come back with a vengeance. Nations that build walls to keep out goods, people and talent will get out-competed by other nations in the product market. This realization will make most countries reverse their knee-jerk anti-globalization; and the ones that do not will cease to be important global players. Either way, globalization will be back on track and with a much greater amount of outsourcing.

To return, more critically this time, to our earlier aside on Ethiopia, its historical and contemporary record on tampering with internet connectivity 9 in an attempt to muzzle inter-ethnic tensions and political dissent will not serve it well in such a post-pandemic scenario. This is a useful reminder for all emerging market economies.

We hope that human beings will emerge from this crisis more aware of the problems of sustainability. This could divert some demand from luxury goods to better health, and what is best described as “creative consumption”: art, music, and culture. 10 The former will mean much larger healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors.

But to take advantage of these new opportunities, nations will need to navigate the current predicament so that they have a viable economy once the pandemic passes. Thus it is important to be able to control the pandemic while keeping the economy open. There is some emerging literature 11 on this, but much more is needed. This is a governance challenge of a kind rarely faced, because the pandemic has disrupted normal markets and there is need, at least in the short run, for governments to step in to fill the caveat.

Emerging economies will have to devise novel governance strategies for doing this double duty of tamping down on new infections without strident controls on economic behavior and without blindly imitating Europe and America.

Here is an example. One interesting opportunity amidst this chaos is to tap into the “resource” of those who have already had COVID-19 and are immune, even if only in the short-term—we still have no definitive evidence on the length of acquired immunity. These people can be offered a high salary to work in sectors that require physical interaction with others. This will help keep supply chains unbroken. Normally, the market would have on its own caused such a salary increase but in this case, the main benefit of marshaling this labor force is on the aggregate economy and GDP and therefore is a classic case of positive externality, which the free market does not adequately reward. It is more a challenge of governance. As with most economic policy, this will need careful research and design before being implemented. We have to be aware that a policy like this will come with its risk of bribery and corruption. There is also the moral hazard challenge of poor people choosing to get COVID-19 in order to qualify for these special jobs. Safeguards will be needed against these risks. But we believe that any government that succeeds in implementing an intelligently-designed intervention to draw on this huge, under-utilized resource can have a big, positive impact on the economy 12 .

This is just one idea. We must innovate in different ways to survive the crisis and then have the ability to navigate the new world that will emerge, hopefully in the not too distant future.

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Note: We are grateful for financial support from Cornell University’s Hatfield Fund for the research associated with this paper. We also wish to express our gratitude to Homi Kharas for many suggestions and David Batcheck for generous editorial help.

• “GDP Annual Growth Rate – Forecast 2020-2022,” Trading Economics, https://tradingeconomics.com/forecast/gdp-annual-growth-rate.
• “Government Cites Various Statistical Models, Says Averted Between 1.4 Million-2.9 Million Cases Due To Lockdown,” Business World, May 23, 2020, www.businessworld.in/article/Government-Cites-Various-Statistical-Models-Says-Averted-Between-1-4-million-2-9-million-Cases-Due-To-Lockdown/23-05-2020-193002/.
• Suvrat Raju, “Did the Indian lockdown avert deaths?” medRxiv , July 5, 2020, https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr183813#A1.
• “COVID Policy Tracker,” Oxford University, https://github.com/OxCGRT/covid-policy-tracker t.
• Debraj Ray and S. Subramanian, “India’s Lockdown: An Interim Report,” NBER Working Paper, May 2020, https://www.nber.org/papers/w27282.
• Gopika Gopakumar and Shayan Ghosh, “Rural recovery could slow down as cases rise, says Ghosh,” Mint, August 19, 2020, https://www.livemint.com/news/india/rural-recovery-could-slow-down-as-cases-rise-says-ghosh-11597801644015.html.
• Pierina Pighi Bel and Jake Horton, “Coronavirus: What’s happening in Peru?,” BBC, July 9, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-53150808.
• “No lockdown, few ventilators, but Ethiopia is beating Covid-19,” Financial Times, May 27, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/7c6327ca-a00b-11ea-b65d-489c67b0d85d.
• Cara Anna, “Ethiopia enters 3rd week of internet shutdown after unrest,” Washington Post, July 14, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/ethiopia-enters-3rd-week-of-internet-shutdown-after-unrest/2020/07/14/4699c400-c5d6-11ea-a825-8722004e4150_story.html.
• Patrick Kabanda, The Creative Wealth of Nations: Can the Arts Advance Development? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
• Guanlin Li et al, “Disease-dependent interaction policies to support health and economic outcomes during the COVID-19 epidemic,” medRxiv, August 2020, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.24.20180752v3.
• For helpful discussion concerning this idea, we are grateful to Turab Hussain, Daksh Walia and Mehr-un-Nisa, during a seminar of South Asian Economics Students’ Meet (SAESM).

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April 3, 2024

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COVID-19 photo essay: We’re all in this together

About the author, department of global communications.

The United Nations Department of Global Communications (DGC) promotes global awareness and understanding of the work of the United Nations.

23 June 2020 – The COVID-19 pandemic has  demonstrated the interconnected nature of our world – and that no one is safe until everyone is safe.  Only by acting in solidarity can communities save lives and overcome the devastating socio-economic impacts of the virus.  In partnership with the United Nations, people around the world are showing acts of humanity, inspiring hope for a better future. 

Everyone can do something    

Rauf Salem, a volunteer, instructs children on the right way to wash their hands, in Sana'a, Yemen.  Simple measures, such as maintaining physical distance, washing hands frequently and wearing a mask are imperative if the fight against COVID-19 is to be won.  Photo: UNICEF/UNI341697

Creating hope

Venezuelan refugee Juan Batista Ramos, 69, plays guitar in front of a mural he painted at the Tancredo Neves temporary shelter in Boa Vista, Brazil to help lift COVID-19 quarantine blues.  “Now, everywhere you look you will see a landscape to remind us that there is beauty in the world,” he says.  Ramos is among the many artists around the world using the power of culture to inspire hope and solidarity during the pandemic.  Photo: UNHCR/Allana Ferreira

Inclusive solutions

Wendy Schellemans, an education assistant at the Royal Woluwe Institute in Brussels, models a transparent face mask designed to help the hard of hearing.  The United Nations and partners are working to ensure that responses to COVID-19 leave no one behind.  Photo courtesy of Royal Woluwe Institute

Humanity at its best

Maryna, a community worker at the Arts Centre for Children and Youth in Chasiv Yar village, Ukraine, makes face masks on a sewing machine donated by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and civil society partner, Proliska.  She is among the many people around the world who are voluntarily addressing the shortage of masks on the market. Photo: UNHCR/Artem Hetman

Keep future leaders learning

A mother helps her daughter Ange, 8, take classes on television at home in Man, Côte d'Ivoire.  Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, caregivers and educators have responded in stride and have been instrumental in finding ways to keep children learning.  In Côte d'Ivoire, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) partnered with the Ministry of Education on a ‘school at home’ initiative, which includes taping lessons to be aired on national TV and radio.  Ange says: “I like to study at home.  My mum is a teacher and helps me a lot.  Of course, I miss my friends, but I can sleep a bit longer in the morning.  Later I want to become a lawyer or judge."  Photo: UNICEF/UNI320749

Global solidarity

People in Nigeria’s Lagos State simulate sneezing into their elbows during a coronavirus prevention campaign.  Many African countries do not have strong health care systems.  “Global solidarity with Africa is an imperative – now and for recovering better,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.  “Ending the pandemic in Africa is essential for ending it across the world.” Photo: UNICEF Nigeria/2020/Ojo

A new way of working

Henri Abued Manzano, a tour guide at the United Nations Information Service (UNIS) in Vienna, speaks from his apartment.  COVID-19 upended the way people work, but they can be creative while in quarantine.  “We quickly decided that if visitors can’t come to us, we will have to come to them,” says Johanna Kleinert, Chief of the UNIS Visitors Service in Vienna.  Photo courtesy of Kevin Kühn

Life goes on

Hundreds of millions of babies are expected to be born during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Fionn, son of Chloe O'Doherty and her husband Patrick, is among them.  The couple says: “It's all over.  We did it.  Brought life into the world at a time when everything is so uncertain.  The relief and love are palpable.  Nothing else matters.”  Photo: UNICEF/UNI321984/Bopape

Putting meals on the table

Sudanese refugee Halima, in Tripoli, Libya, says food assistance is making her life better.  COVID-19 is exacerbating the existing hunger crisis.  Globally, 6 million more people could be pushed into extreme poverty unless the international community acts now.  United Nations aid agencies are appealing for more funding to reach vulnerable populations.  Photo: UNHCR

Supporting the frontlines

The United Nations Air Service, run by the World Food Programme (WFP), distributes protective gear donated by the Jack Ma Foundation and Alibaba Group, in Somalia. The United Nations is using its supply chain capacity to rapidly move badly needed personal protective equipment, such as medical masks, gloves, gowns and face-shields to the frontline of the battle against COVID-19. Photo: WFP/Jama Hassan  

S7-Episode 2: Bringing Health to the World

“You see, we're not doing this work to make ourselves feel better. That sort of conventional notion of what a do-gooder is. We're doing this work because we are totally convinced that it's not necessary in today's wealthy world for so many people to be experiencing discomfort, for so many people to be experiencing hardship, for so many people to have their lives and their livelihoods imperiled.”

Dr. David Nabarro has dedicated his life to global health. After a long career that’s taken him from the horrors of war torn Iraq, to the devastating aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami, he is still spurred to action by the tremendous inequalities in global access to medical care.

“The thing that keeps me awake most at night is the rampant inequities in our world…We see an awful lot of needless suffering.”

:: David Nabarro interviewed by Melissa Fleming

Brazilian ballet pirouettes during pandemic

Ballet Manguinhos, named for its favela in Rio de Janeiro, returns to the stage after a long absence during the COVID-19 pandemic. It counts 250 children and teenagers from the favela as its performers. The ballet group provides social support in a community where poverty, hunger and teen pregnancy are constant issues.

Radio journalist gives the facts on COVID-19 in Uzbekistan

The pandemic has put many people to the test, and journalists are no exception. Coronavirus has waged war not only against people's lives and well-being but has also spawned countless hoaxes and scientific falsehoods.

Get health information you can use, fact-checked by Nebraska Medicine experts.

How to fight COVID-19 at home

Critical care physician and pulmonologist Brian Boer, MD , has been treating COVID-19 patients since the beginning of the pandemic. Here he shares his expertise on fighting COVID-19 at home – some of it different from what's shared online.

How to rest

First, if you're fighting COVID-19 at home, you don't need to sleep in a certain position. "We know that sleeping on your stomach can improve your oxygenation if you need supplemental oxygen in the hospital. If you don't have severe COVID-19, lying on your stomach or side is not going to affect your disease," says Dr. Boer. 

You should move around somewhat during the day, but you don't need to wake up every two hours to walk around. "Maintain your mobility, meaning don't lay on the couch all day, but that isn't specific to COVID-19," says Dr. Boer. "It's more to avoid blood clots and similar issues." Also, moving your arms around doesn't open up your lungs. "Just being mobile and active helps you take a deep breath," he says.

What to take and what to avoid

Maintain a healthy, well-balanced diet. Stay hydrated, especially if you're throwing up or have diarrhea. 

No supplements or vitamins have shown any proven benefit for treating COVID-19. If you want to take a normal dose of a vitamin, that's fine. It won't hurt, but there's no evidence that it will help you recover from COVID-19 faster.

Treat your symptoms like you would for other infections, like the common cold. If you have a fever or muscle aches, you can take over-the-counter medications like acetaminophen, naproxen or ibuprofen.

Some drugs will do more harm than good, such as antibiotics. "Antibiotics, in general, do not help COVID-19," says Dr. Boer. Antibiotics combat bacteria, not viruses. So you're left with the side effects of the antibiotics while getting no benefit at all. "Hydroxychloroquine and its derivatives have also shown no benefit to treating COVID-19. A lot of the data shows that it could lead to cardiac events or other secondary outcomes."

When to seek care

The majority of people with COVID-19 have mild symptoms and can treat it at home. Seek medical attention if you have chest pain or shortness of breath .

It's essential to avoid spreading COVID-19 to others. Find out how to keep others safe if you test positive .  

Related articles

Can zinc, oregano oil, vitamin C or D prevent or treat COVID-19?

Want to support your immune system? Better sleep on it

You asked, we answered: What to do if you test positive for COVID-19

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Students’ Essays on Infectious Disease Prevention, COVID-19 Published Nationwide

As part of the BIO 173: Global Change and Infectious Disease course, Professor Fred Cohan assigns students to write an essay persuading others to prevent future and mitigate present infectious diseases. If students submit their essay to a news outlet—and it’s published—Cohan awards them with extra credit.

As a result of this assignment, more than 25 students have had their work published in newspapers across the United States. Many of these essays cite and applaud the University’s Keep Wes Safe campaign and its COVID-19 testing protocols.

Cohan, professor of biology and Huffington Foundation Professor in the College of the Environment (COE), began teaching the Global Change and Infectious Disease course in 2009, when the COE was established. “I wanted very much to contribute a course to what I saw as a real game-changer in Wesleyan’s interest in the environment. The course is about all the ways that human demands on the environment have brought us infectious diseases, over past millennia and in the present, and why our environmental disturbances will continue to bring us infections into the future.”

Over the years, Cohan learned that he can sustainably teach about 170 students every year without running out of interested students. This fall, he had 207. Although he didn’t change the overall structure of his course to accommodate COVID-19 topics, he did add material on the current pandemic to various sections of the course.

“I wouldn’t say that the population of the class increased tremendously as a result of COVID-19, but I think the enthusiasm of the students for the material has increased substantially,” he said.

To accommodate online learning, Cohan shaved off 15 minutes from his normal 80-minute lectures to allow for discussion sections, led by Cohan and teaching assistants. “While the lectures mostly dealt with biology, the discussions focused on how changes in behavior and policy can solve the infectious disease problems brought by human disturbance of the environment,” he said.

Based on student responses to an introspective exam question, Cohan learned that many students enjoyed a new hope that we could each contribute to fighting infectious disease. “They discovered that the solution to infectious disease is not entirely a waiting game for the right technologies to come along,” he said. “Many enjoyed learning about fighting infectious disease from a moral and social perspective. And especially, the students enjoyed learning about the ‘socialism of the microbe,’ how preventing and curing others’ infections will prevent others’ infections from becoming our own. The students enjoyed seeing how this idea can drive both domestic and international health policies.”

A sampling of the published student essays are below:

Alexander Giummo ’22 and Mike Dunderdale’s ’23  op-ed titled “ A National Testing Proposal: Let’s Fight Back Against COVID-19 ” was published in the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.

They wrote: “With an expansive and increased testing plan for U.S. citizens, those who are COVID-positive could limit the number of contacts they have, and this would also help to enable more effective contact tracing. Testing could also allow for the return of some ‘normal’ events, such as small social gatherings, sports, and in-person class and work schedules.

“We propose a national testing strategy in line with the one that has kept Wesleyan students safe this year. The plan would require a strong push by the federal government to fund the initiative, but it is vital to successful containment of the virus.

“Twice a week, all people living in the U.S. should report to a local testing site staffed with professionals where the anterior nasal swab Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test, used by Wesleyan and supported by the Broad Institute, would be implemented.”

Kalyani Mohan ’22 and Kalli Jackson ’22 penned an essay titled “ Where Public Health Meets Politics: COVID-19 in the United States ,” which was published in Wesleyan’s Arcadia Political Review .

They wrote: “While the U.S. would certainly benefit from a strengthened pandemic response team and structural changes to public health systems, that alone isn’t enough, as American society is immensely stratified, socially and culturally. The politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic shows that individualism, libertarianism and capitalism are deeply ingrained in American culture, to the extent that Americans often blind to the fact community welfare can be equivalent to personal welfare. Pandemics are multifaceted, and preventing them requires not just a cultural shift but an emotional one amongst the American people, one guided by empathy—towards other people, different communities and the planet. Politics should be a tool, not a weapon against its people.”

Sydnee Goyer ’21 and Marcel Thompson’s ’22  essay “ This Flu Season Will Be Decisive in the Fight Against COVID-19 ” also was published in Arcadia Political Review .

“With winter approaching all around the Northern Hemisphere, people are preparing for what has already been named a “twindemic,” meaning the joint threat of the coronavirus and the seasonal flu,” they wrote. “While it is known that seasonal vaccinations reduce the risk of getting the flu by up to 60% and also reduce the severity of the illness after the contamination, additional research has been conducted in order to know whether or not flu shots could reduce the risk of people getting COVID-19. In addition to the flu shot, it is essential that people remain vigilant in maintaining proper social distancing, washing your hands thoroughly, and continuing to wear masks in public spaces.”

An op-ed titled “ The Pandemic Has Shown Us How Workplace Culture Needs to Change ,” written by Adam Hickey ’22 and George Fuss ’21, was published in Park City, Utah’s The Park Record .

They wrote: “One review of academic surveys (most of which were conducted in the United States) conducted in 2019 found that between 35% and 97% of respondents in those surveys reported having attended work while they were ill, often because of workplace culture or policy which generated pressure to do so. Choosing to ignore sickness and return to the workplace while one is ill puts colleagues at risk, regardless of the perceived severity of your own illness; COVID-19 is an overbearing reminder that a disease that may cause mild, even cold-like symptoms for some can still carry fatal consequences for others.

“A mandatory paid sick leave policy for every worker, ideally across the globe, would allow essential workers to return to work when necessary while still providing enough wiggle room for economically impoverished employees to take time off without going broke if they believe they’ve contracted an illness so as not to infect the rest of their workplace and the public at large.”

Women’s cross country team members and classmates Jane Hollander ’23 and Sara Greene ’23 wrote a sports-themed essay titled “ This Season, High School Winter Sports Aren’t Worth the Risk ,” which was published in Tap into Scotch Plains/Fanwood , based in Scotch Plains, N.J. Their essay focused on the risks high school sports pose on student-athletes, their families, and the greater community.

“We don’t propose cutting off sports entirely— rather, we need to be realistic about the levels at which athletes should be participating. There are ways to make practices safer,” they wrote. “At [Wesleyan], we began the season in ‘cohorts,’ so the amount of people exposed to one another would be smaller. For non-contact sports, social distancing can be easily implemented, and for others, teams can focus on drills, strength and conditioning workouts, and skill-building exercises. Racing sports such as swim and track can compete virtually, comparing times with other schools, and team sports can focus their competition on intra-team scrimmages. These changes can allow for the continuation of a sense of normalcy and team camaraderie without the exposure to students from different geographic areas in confined, indoor spaces.”

Brook Guiffre ’23 and Maddie Clarke’s ’22  op-ed titled “ On the Pandemic ” was published in Hometown Weekly,  based in Medfield, Mass.

“The first case of COVID-19 in the United States was recorded on January 20th, 2020. For the next month and a half, the U.S. continued operating normally, while many other countries began their lockdown,” they wrote. “One month later, on February 29th, 2020, the federal government approved a national testing program, but it was too little too late. The U.S. was already in pandemic mode, and completely unprepared. Frontline workers lacked access to N-95 masks, infected patients struggled to get tested, and national leaders informed the public that COVID-19 was nothing more than the common flu. Ultimately, this unpreparedness led to thousands of avoidable deaths and long-term changes to daily life. With the risk of novel infectious diseases emerging in the future being high, it is imperative that the U.S. learn from its failure and better prepare for future pandemics now. By strengthening our public health response and re-establishing government organizations specialized in disease control, we have the ability to prevent more years spent masked and six feet apart.”

In addition, their other essay, “ On Mass Extinction ,” was also published by Hometown Weekly .

“The sixth mass extinction—which scientists have coined as the Holocene Extinction—is upon us. According to the United Nations, around one million plant and animal species are currently in danger of extinction, and many more within the next decade. While other extinctions have occurred in Earth’s history, none have occurred at such a rapid rate,” they wrote. “For the sake of both biodiversity and infectious diseases, it is in our best interest to stop pushing this Holocene Extinction further.”

An essay titled “ Learning from Our Mistakes: How to Protect Ourselves and Our Communities from Diseases ,” written by Nicole Veru ’21 and Zoe Darmon ’21, was published in My Hometown Bronxville, based in Bronxville, N.Y.

“We can protect ourselves and others from future infectious diseases by ensuring that we are vaccinated,” they wrote. “Vaccines have high levels of success if enough people get them. Due to vaccines, society is no longer ravaged by childhood diseases such as mumps, rubella, measles, and smallpox. We have been able to eradicate diseases through vaccines; smallpox, one of the world’s most consequential diseases, was eradicated from the world in the 1970s.

“In 2000, the U.S. was nearly free of measles, yet, due to hesitations by anti-vaxxers, there continues to be cases. From 2000–2015 there were over 18 measles outbreaks in the U.S. This is because unless a disease is completely eradicated, there will be a new generation susceptible.

“Although vaccines are not 100% effective at preventing infection, if we continue to get vaccinated, we protect ourselves and those around us. If enough people are vaccinated, societies can develop herd immunity. The amount of people vaccinated to obtain herd immunity depends on the disease, but if this fraction is obtained, the spread of disease is contained. Through herd immunity, we protect those who may not be able to get vaccinated, such as people who are immunocompromised and the tiny portion of people for whom the vaccine is not effective.”

Dhruvi Rana ’22 and Bryce Gillis ’22 co-authored an op-ed titled “ We Must Educate Those Who Remain Skeptical of the Dangers of COVID-19 ,” which was published in Rhode Island Central .

“As Rhode Island enters the winter season, temperatures are beginning to drop and many studies have demonstrated that colder weather and lower humidity are correlated with higher transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19,” they wrote. “By simply talking or breathing, we release respiratory droplets and aerosols (tiny fluid particles which could carry the coronavirus pathogen), which can remain in the air for minutes to hours.

“In order to establish herd immunity in the US, we must educate those who remain skeptical of the dangers of COVID-19.  Whether community-driven or state-funded, educational campaigns are needed to ensure that everyone fully comprehends how severe COVID-19 is and the significance of airborne transmission. While we await a vaccine, it is necessary now more than ever that we social distance, avoid crowds, and wear masks, given that colder temperatures will likely yield increased transmission of the virus.”

Danielle Rinaldi ’21 and Verónica Matos Socorro ’21 published their op-ed titled “ Community Forum: How Mask-Wearing Demands a Cultural Reset ” in the Ewing Observer , based in Lawrence, N.J.

“In their own attempt to change personal behavior during the pandemic, Wesleyan University has mandated mask-wearing in almost every facet of campus life,” they wrote. “As members of our community, we must recognize that mask-wearing is something we are all responsible and accountable for, not only because it is a form of protection for us, but just as important for others as well. However, it seems as though both Covid fatigue and complacency are dominating the mindsets of Americans, leading to even more unwillingness to mask up. Ultimately, it is inevitable that this pandemic will not be the last in our lifespan due to global warming creating irreversible losses in biodiversity. As a result, it is imperative that we adopt the norm of mask-wearing now and undergo a culture shift of the abandonment of an individualistic mindset, and instead, create a society that prioritizes taking care of others for the benefit of all.”

Shayna Dollinger ’22 and Hayley Lipson ’21  wrote an essay titled “ My Pandemic Year in College Has Brought Pride and Purpose. ” Dollinger submitted the piece, rewritten in first person, to Jewish News of Northern California . Read more about Dollinger’s publication in this News @ Wesleyan article .

“I lay in the dead grass, a 6-by-6-foot square all to myself. I cheer for my best friend, who is on the stage constructed at the bottom of Foss hill, dancing with her Bollywood dance group. Masks cover their ordinarily smiling faces as their bodies move in sync. Looking around at friends and classmates, each in their own 6-by-6 world, I feel an overwhelming sense of normalcy.

“One of the ways in which Wesleyan has prevented outbreaks on campus is by holding safe, socially distanced events that students want to attend. By giving us places to be and things to do on the weekends, we are discouraged from breaking rules and causing outbreaks at ‘super-spreader’ events.”

An op-ed written by Luna Mac-Williams ’22 and Daëlle Coriolan ’24 titled “ Collectivist Practices to Combat COVID-19 ” was published in the Wesleyan Argus .

“We are embroiled in a global pandemic that disproportionately affects poor communities of color, and in the midst of a higher cultural consciousness of systemic inequities,” they wrote. “A cultural shift to center collectivist thought and action not only would prove helpful in disease prevention, but also belongs in conversation with the Black Lives Matter movement. Collectivist models of thinking effectively target the needs of vulnerable populations including the sick, the disenfranchised, the systematically marginalized. Collectivist systems provide care, decentering the capitalist, individualist system, and focusing on how communities can work to be self-sufficient and uplift our own neighbors.”

An essay written by Maria Noto ’21 , titled “ U.S. Individualism Has Deadly Consequences ,” is published in the Oneonta Daily Star , based in Oneonta, N.Y.

She wrote, “When analyzing the cultures of certain East Asian countries, several differences stand out. For instance, when people are sick and during the cold and flu season, many East Asian cultures, including South Korea, use mask-wearing. What is considered a threat to freedom by some Americans is a preventive action and community obligation in this example. This, along with many other cultural differences, is insightful in understanding their ability to contain the virus.

“These differences are deeply seeded in the values of a culture. However, there is hope for the U.S. and other individualistic cultures in recognizing and adopting these community-centered approaches. Our mindset needs to be revolutionized with the help of federal and local assistance: mandating masks, passing another stimulus package, contact tracing, etc… However, these measures will be unsuccessful unless everyone participates for the good of a community.”

A published op-ed by Madison Szabo ’23 , Caitlyn Ferrante ’23 ran in the Two Rivers Times . The piece is titled “ Anxiety and Aspiration: Analyzing the Politicization of the Pandemic .”

John Lee ’21 and Taylor Goodman-Leong ’21 have published their op-ed titled “ Reassessing the media’s approach to COVID-19 ” in Weekly Monday Cafe 24 (Page 2).

An essay by Eleanor Raab ’21 and Elizabeth Nefferdorf ’22 titled “ Preventing the Next Epidemic ” was published in The Almanac .

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Persuasive Essay Guide

Persuasive Essay About Covid19

How to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid19 | Examples & Tips

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Are you looking to write a persuasive essay about the Covid-19 pandemic?

Writing a compelling and informative essay about this global crisis can be challenging. It requires researching the latest information, understanding the facts, and presenting your argument persuasively.

But don’t worry! with some guidance from experts, you’ll be able to write an effective and persuasive essay about Covid-19.

In this blog post, we’ll outline the basics of writing a persuasive essay . We’ll provide clear examples, helpful tips, and essential information for crafting your own persuasive piece on Covid-19.

Read on to get started on your essay.

• 1. Steps to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid-19
• 2. Examples of Persuasive Essay About Covid19
• 3. Examples of Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 Vaccine
• 4. Examples of Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 Integration
• 5. Examples of Argumentative Essay About Covid 19
• 6. Examples of Persuasive Speeches About Covid-19
• 7. Tips to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid-19
• 8. Common Topics for a Persuasive Essay on COVID-19 

Steps to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid-19

Here are the steps to help you write a persuasive essay on this topic, along with an example essay:

Step 1: Choose a Specific Thesis Statement

Your thesis statement should clearly state your position on a specific aspect of COVID-19. It should be debatable and clear. For example:

Step 2: Research and Gather Information

Collect reliable and up-to-date information from reputable sources to support your thesis statement. This may include statistics, expert opinions, and scientific studies. For instance:

• COVID-19 vaccination effectiveness data
• Information on vaccine mandates in different countries
• Expert statements from health organizations like the WHO or CDC

Step 3: Outline Your Essay

Create a clear and organized outline to structure your essay. A persuasive essay typically follows this structure:

• Introduction
• Background Information
• Body Paragraphs (with supporting evidence)
• Counterarguments (addressing opposing views)

Step 4: Write the Introduction

In the introduction, grab your reader's attention and present your thesis statement. For example:

Step 5: Provide Background Information

Offer context and background information to help your readers understand the issue better. For instance:

Step 6: Develop Body Paragraphs

Each body paragraph should present a single point or piece of evidence that supports your thesis statement. Use clear topic sentences, evidence, and analysis. Here's an example:

Step 7: Address Counterarguments

Acknowledge opposing viewpoints and refute them with strong counterarguments. This demonstrates that you've considered different perspectives. For example:

Step 8: Write the Conclusion

Summarize your main points and restate your thesis statement in the conclusion. End with a strong call to action or thought-provoking statement. For instance:

Step 9: Revise and Proofread

Edit your essay for clarity, coherence, grammar, and spelling errors. Ensure that your argument flows logically.

Step 10: Cite Your Sources

Include proper citations and a bibliography page to give credit to your sources.

Remember to adjust your approach and arguments based on your target audience and the specific angle you want to take in your persuasive essay about COVID-19.

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Examples of Persuasive Essay About Covid19

When writing a persuasive essay about the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s important to consider how you want to present your argument. To help you get started, here are some example essays for you to read:

Check out some more PDF examples below:

Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 Pandemic

Sample Of Persuasive Essay About Covid-19

Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 In The Philippines - Example

If you're in search of a compelling persuasive essay on business, don't miss out on our “ persuasive essay about business ” blog!

Examples of Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 Vaccine

Covid19 vaccines are one of the ways to prevent the spread of Covid-19, but they have been a source of controversy. Different sides argue about the benefits or dangers of the new vaccines. Whatever your point of view is, writing a persuasive essay about it is a good way of organizing your thoughts and persuading others.

A persuasive essay about the Covid-19 vaccine could consider the benefits of getting vaccinated as well as the potential side effects.

Below are some examples of persuasive essays on getting vaccinated for Covid-19.

Covid19 Vaccine Persuasive Essay

Persuasive Essay on Covid Vaccines

Interested in thought-provoking discussions on abortion? Read our persuasive essay about abortion blog to eplore arguments!

Examples of Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 Integration

Covid19 has drastically changed the way people interact in schools, markets, and workplaces. In short, it has affected all aspects of life. However, people have started to learn to live with Covid19.

Writing a persuasive essay about it shouldn't be stressful. Read the sample essay below to get idea for your own essay about Covid19 integration.

Persuasive Essay About Working From Home During Covid19

Searching for the topic of Online Education? Our persuasive essay about online education is a must-read.

Examples of Argumentative Essay About Covid 19

Covid-19 has been an ever-evolving issue, with new developments and discoveries being made on a daily basis.

Writing an argumentative essay about such an issue is both interesting and challenging. It allows you to evaluate different aspects of the pandemic, as well as consider potential solutions.

Here are some examples of argumentative essays on Covid19.

Argumentative Essay About Covid19 Sample

Argumentative Essay About Covid19 With Introduction Body and Conclusion

Looking for a persuasive take on the topic of smoking? You'll find it all related arguments in out Persuasive Essay About Smoking blog!

Examples of Persuasive Speeches About Covid-19

Do you need to prepare a speech about Covid19 and need examples? We have them for you!

Persuasive speeches about Covid-19 can provide the audience with valuable insights on how to best handle the pandemic. They can be used to advocate for specific changes in policies or simply raise awareness about the virus.

Check out some examples of persuasive speeches on Covid-19:

Persuasive Speech About Covid-19 Example

Persuasive Speech About Vaccine For Covid-19

You can also read persuasive essay examples on other topics to master your persuasive techniques!

Tips to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid-19

Writing a persuasive essay about COVID-19 requires a thoughtful approach to present your arguments effectively. 

Here are some tips to help you craft a compelling persuasive essay on this topic:

Choose a Specific Angle

Start by narrowing down your focus. COVID-19 is a broad topic, so selecting a specific aspect or issue related to it will make your essay more persuasive and manageable. For example, you could focus on vaccination, public health measures, the economic impact, or misinformation.

Provide Credible Sources 

Support your arguments with credible sources such as scientific studies, government reports, and reputable news outlets. Reliable sources enhance the credibility of your essay.

Use Persuasive Language

Employ persuasive techniques, such as ethos (establishing credibility), pathos (appealing to emotions), and logos (using logic and evidence). Use vivid examples and anecdotes to make your points relatable.

Organize Your Essay

Structure your essay involves creating a persuasive essay outline and establishing a logical flow from one point to the next. Each paragraph should focus on a single point, and transitions between paragraphs should be smooth and logical.

Emphasize Benefits

Highlight the benefits of your proposed actions or viewpoints. Explain how your suggestions can improve public health, safety, or well-being. Make it clear why your audience should support your position.

Use Visuals -H3

Incorporate graphs, charts, and statistics when applicable. Visual aids can reinforce your arguments and make complex data more accessible to your readers.

Call to Action

End your essay with a strong call to action. Encourage your readers to take a specific step or consider your viewpoint. Make it clear what you want them to do or think after reading your essay.

Revise and Edit

Proofread your essay for grammar, spelling, and clarity. Make sure your arguments are well-structured and that your writing flows smoothly.

Seek Feedback 

Have someone else read your essay to get feedback. They may offer valuable insights and help you identify areas where your persuasive techniques can be improved.

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Common Topics for a Persuasive Essay on COVID-19 

Here are some persuasive essay topics on COVID-19:

• The Importance of Vaccination Mandates for COVID-19 Control
• Balancing Public Health and Personal Freedom During a Pandemic
• The Economic Impact of Lockdowns vs. Public Health Benefits
• The Role of Misinformation in Fueling Vaccine Hesitancy
• Remote Learning vs. In-Person Education: What's Best for Students?
• The Ethics of Vaccine Distribution: Prioritizing Vulnerable Populations
• The Mental Health Crisis Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic
• The Long-Term Effects of COVID-19 on Healthcare Systems
• Global Cooperation vs. Vaccine Nationalism in Fighting the Pandemic
• The Future of Telemedicine: Expanding Healthcare Access Post-COVID-19

In search of more inspiring topics for your next persuasive essay? Our persuasive essay topics blog has plenty of ideas!

To sum it up,

You have read good sample essays and got some helpful tips. You now have the tools you needed to write a persuasive essay about Covid-19. So don't let the doubts stop you, start writing!

If you need professional writing help, don't worry! We've got that for you as well.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Are there any ethical considerations when writing a persuasive essay about covid-19.

Yes, there are ethical considerations when writing a persuasive essay about COVID-19. It's essential to ensure the information is accurate, not contribute to misinformation, and be sensitive to the pandemic's impact on individuals and communities. Additionally, respecting diverse viewpoints and emphasizing public health benefits can promote ethical communication.

What impact does COVID-19 have on society?

The impact of COVID-19 on society is far-reaching. It has led to job and economic losses, an increase in stress and mental health disorders, and changes in education systems. It has also had a negative effect on social interactions, as people have been asked to limit their contact with others.

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• Volume 76, Issue 2
• COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on social relationships and health
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• http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1512-4471 Emily Long 1 ,
• Susan Patterson 1 ,
• Karen Maxwell 1 ,
• Carolyn Blake 1 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7342-4566 Raquel Bosó Pérez 1 ,
• Ruth Lewis 1 ,
• Mark McCann 1 ,
• Julie Riddell 1 ,
• Kathryn Skivington 1 ,
• Rachel Wilson-Lowe 1 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4409-6601 Kirstin R Mitchell 2
• 1 MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit , University of Glasgow , Glasgow , UK
• 2 MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, Institute of Health & Wellbeing , University of Glasgow , Glasgow , UK
• Correspondence to Dr Emily Long, MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G3 7HR, UK; emily.long{at}glasgow.ac.uk

This essay examines key aspects of social relationships that were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses explicitly on relational mechanisms of health and brings together theory and emerging evidence on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic to make recommendations for future public health policy and recovery. We first provide an overview of the pandemic in the UK context, outlining the nature of the public health response. We then introduce four distinct domains of social relationships: social networks, social support, social interaction and intimacy, highlighting the mechanisms through which the pandemic and associated public health response drastically altered social interactions in each domain. Throughout the essay, the lens of health inequalities, and perspective of relationships as interconnecting elements in a broader system, is used to explore the varying impact of these disruptions. The essay concludes by providing recommendations for longer term recovery ensuring that the social relational cost of COVID-19 is adequately considered in efforts to rebuild.

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Data sharing not applicable as no data sets generated and/or analysed for this study. Data sharing not applicable as no data sets generated or analysed for this essay.

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

https://doi.org/10.1136/jech-2021-216690

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Introduction

Infectious disease pandemics, including SARS and COVID-19, demand intrapersonal behaviour change and present highly complex challenges for public health. 1 A pandemic of an airborne infection, spread easily through social contact, assails human relationships by drastically altering the ways through which humans interact. In this essay, we draw on theories of social relationships to examine specific ways in which relational mechanisms key to health and well-being were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Relational mechanisms refer to the processes between people that lead to change in health outcomes.

At the time of writing, the future surrounding COVID-19 was uncertain. Vaccine programmes were being rolled out in countries that could afford them, but new and more contagious variants of the virus were also being discovered. The recovery journey looked long, with continued disruption to social relationships. The social cost of COVID-19 was only just beginning to emerge, but the mental health impact was already considerable, 2 3 and the inequality of the health burden stark. 4 Knowledge of the epidemiology of COVID-19 accrued rapidly, but evidence of the most effective policy responses remained uncertain.

The initial response to COVID-19 in the UK was reactive and aimed at reducing mortality, with little time to consider the social implications, including for interpersonal and community relationships. The terminology of ‘social distancing’ quickly became entrenched both in public and policy discourse. This equation of physical distance with social distance was regrettable, since only physical proximity causes viral transmission, whereas many forms of social proximity (eg, conversations while walking outdoors) are minimal risk, and are crucial to maintaining relationships supportive of health and well-being.

The aim of this essay is to explore four key relational mechanisms that were impacted by the pandemic and associated restrictions: social networks, social support, social interaction and intimacy. We use relational theories and emerging research on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic response to make three key recommendations: one regarding public health responses; and two regarding social recovery. Our understanding of these mechanisms stems from a ‘systems’ perspective which casts social relationships as interdependent elements within a connected whole. 5

Social networks

Social networks characterise the individuals and social connections that compose a system (such as a workplace, community or society). Social relationships range from spouses and partners, to coworkers, friends and acquaintances. They vary across many dimensions, including, for example, frequency of contact and emotional closeness. Social networks can be understood both in terms of the individuals and relationships that compose the network, as well as the overall network structure (eg, how many of your friends know each other).

Social networks show a tendency towards homophily, or a phenomenon of associating with individuals who are similar to self. 6 This is particularly true for ‘core’ network ties (eg, close friends), while more distant, sometimes called ‘weak’ ties tend to show more diversity. During the height of COVID-19 restrictions, face-to-face interactions were often reduced to core network members, such as partners, family members or, potentially, live-in roommates; some ‘weak’ ties were lost, and interactions became more limited to those closest. Given that peripheral, weaker social ties provide a diversity of resources, opinions and support, 7 COVID-19 likely resulted in networks that were smaller and more homogenous.

Such changes were not inevitable nor necessarily enduring, since social networks are also adaptive and responsive to change, in that a disruption to usual ways of interacting can be replaced by new ways of engaging (eg, Zoom). Yet, important inequalities exist, wherein networks and individual relationships within networks are not equally able to adapt to such changes. For example, individuals with a large number of newly established relationships (eg, university students) may have struggled to transfer these relationships online, resulting in lost contacts and a heightened risk of social isolation. This is consistent with research suggesting that young adults were the most likely to report a worsening of relationships during COVID-19, whereas older adults were the least likely to report a change. 8

Lastly, social connections give rise to emergent properties of social systems, 9 where a community-level phenomenon develops that cannot be attributed to any one member or portion of the network. For example, local area-based networks emerged due to geographic restrictions (eg, stay-at-home orders), resulting in increases in neighbourly support and local volunteering. 10 In fact, research suggests that relationships with neighbours displayed the largest net gain in ratings of relationship quality compared with a range of relationship types (eg, partner, colleague, friend). 8 Much of this was built from spontaneous individual interactions within local communities, which together contributed to the ‘community spirit’ that many experienced. 11 COVID-19 restrictions thus impacted the personal social networks and the structure of the larger networks within the society.

Social support

Social support, referring to the psychological and material resources provided through social interaction, is a critical mechanism through which social relationships benefit health. In fact, social support has been shown to be one of the most important resilience factors in the aftermath of stressful events. 12 In the context of COVID-19, the usual ways in which individuals interact and obtain social support have been severely disrupted.

One such disruption has been to opportunities for spontaneous social interactions. For example, conversations with colleagues in a break room offer an opportunity for socialising beyond one’s core social network, and these peripheral conversations can provide a form of social support. 13 14 A chance conversation may lead to advice helpful to coping with situations or seeking formal help. Thus, the absence of these spontaneous interactions may mean the reduction of indirect support-seeking opportunities. While direct support-seeking behaviour is more effective at eliciting support, it also requires significantly more effort and may be perceived as forceful and burdensome. 15 The shift to homeworking and closure of community venues reduced the number of opportunities for these spontaneous interactions to occur, and has, second, focused them locally. Consequently, individuals whose core networks are located elsewhere, or who live in communities where spontaneous interaction is less likely, have less opportunity to benefit from spontaneous in-person supportive interactions.

However, alongside this disruption, new opportunities to interact and obtain social support have arisen. The surge in community social support during the initial lockdown mirrored that often seen in response to adverse events (eg, natural disasters 16 ). COVID-19 restrictions that confined individuals to their local area also compelled them to focus their in-person efforts locally. Commentators on the initial lockdown in the UK remarked on extraordinary acts of generosity between individuals who belonged to the same community but were unknown to each other. However, research on adverse events also tells us that such community support is not necessarily maintained in the longer term. 16

Meanwhile, online forms of social support are not bound by geography, thus enabling interactions and social support to be received from a wider network of people. Formal online social support spaces (eg, support groups) existed well before COVID-19, but have vastly increased since. While online interactions can increase perceived social support, it is unclear whether remote communication technologies provide an effective substitute from in-person interaction during periods of social distancing. 17 18 It makes intuitive sense that the usefulness of online social support will vary by the type of support offered, degree of social interaction and ‘online communication skills’ of those taking part. Youth workers, for instance, have struggled to keep vulnerable youth engaged in online youth clubs, 19 despite others finding a positive association between amount of digital technology used by individuals during lockdown and perceived social support. 20 Other research has found that more frequent face-to-face contact and phone/video contact both related to lower levels of depression during the time period of March to August 2020, but the negative effect of a lack of contact was greater for those with higher levels of usual sociability. 21 Relatedly, important inequalities in social support exist, such that individuals who occupy more socially disadvantaged positions in society (eg, low socioeconomic status, older people) tend to have less access to social support, 22 potentially exacerbated by COVID-19.

Social and interactional norms

Interactional norms are key relational mechanisms which build trust, belonging and identity within and across groups in a system. Individuals in groups and societies apply meaning by ‘approving, arranging and redefining’ symbols of interaction. 23 A handshake, for instance, is a powerful symbol of trust and equality. Depending on context, not shaking hands may symbolise a failure to extend friendship, or a failure to reach agreement. The norms governing these symbols represent shared values and identity; and mutual understanding of these symbols enables individuals to achieve orderly interactions, establish supportive relationship accountability and connect socially. 24 25

Physical distancing measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 radically altered these norms of interaction, particularly those used to convey trust, affinity, empathy and respect (eg, hugging, physical comforting). 26 As epidemic waves rose and fell, the work to negotiate these norms required intense cognitive effort; previously taken-for-granted interactions were re-examined, factoring in current restriction levels, own and (assumed) others’ vulnerability and tolerance of risk. This created awkwardness, and uncertainty, for example, around how to bring closure to an in-person interaction or convey warmth. The instability in scripted ways of interacting created particular strain for individuals who already struggled to encode and decode interactions with others (eg, those who are deaf or have autism spectrum disorder); difficulties often intensified by mask wearing. 27

Large social gatherings—for example, weddings, school assemblies, sporting events—also present key opportunities for affirming and assimilating interactional norms, building cohesion and shared identity and facilitating cooperation across social groups. 28 Online ‘equivalents’ do not easily support ‘social-bonding’ activities such as singing and dancing, and rarely enable chance/spontaneous one-on-one conversations with peripheral/weaker network ties (see the Social networks section) which can help strengthen bonds across a larger network. The loss of large gatherings to celebrate rites of passage (eg, bar mitzvah, weddings) has additional relational costs since these events are performed by and for communities to reinforce belonging, and to assist in transitioning to new phases of life. 29 The loss of interaction with diverse others via community and large group gatherings also reduces intergroup contact, which may then tend towards more prejudiced outgroup attitudes. While online interaction can go some way to mimicking these interaction norms, there are key differences. A sense of anonymity, and lack of in-person emotional cues, tends to support norms of polarisation and aggression in expressing differences of opinion online. And while online platforms have potential to provide intergroup contact, the tendency of much social media to form homogeneous ‘echo chambers’ can serve to further reduce intergroup contact. 30 31

Intimacy relates to the feeling of emotional connection and closeness with other human beings. Emotional connection, through romantic, friendship or familial relationships, fulfils a basic human need 32 and strongly benefits health, including reduced stress levels, improved mental health, lowered blood pressure and reduced risk of heart disease. 32 33 Intimacy can be fostered through familiarity, feeling understood and feeling accepted by close others. 34

Intimacy via companionship and closeness is fundamental to mental well-being. Positively, the COVID-19 pandemic has offered opportunities for individuals to (re)connect and (re)strengthen close relationships within their household via quality time together, following closure of many usual external social activities. Research suggests that the first full UK lockdown period led to a net gain in the quality of steady relationships at a population level, 35 but amplified existing inequalities in relationship quality. 35 36 For some in single-person households, the absence of a companion became more conspicuous, leading to feelings of loneliness and lower mental well-being. 37 38 Additional pandemic-related relational strain 39 40 resulted, for some, in the initiation or intensification of domestic abuse. 41 42

Physical touch is another key aspect of intimacy, a fundamental human need crucial in maintaining and developing intimacy within close relationships. 34 Restrictions on social interactions severely restricted the number and range of people with whom physical affection was possible. The reduction in opportunity to give and receive affectionate physical touch was not experienced equally. Many of those living alone found themselves completely without physical contact for extended periods. The deprivation of physical touch is evidenced to take a heavy emotional toll. 43 Even in future, once physical expressions of affection can resume, new levels of anxiety over germs may introduce hesitancy into previously fluent blending of physical and verbal intimate social connections. 44

The pandemic also led to shifts in practices and norms around sexual relationship building and maintenance, as individuals adapted and sought alternative ways of enacting sexual intimacy. This too is important, given that intimate sexual activity has known benefits for health. 45 46 Given that social restrictions hinged on reducing household mixing, possibilities for partnered sexual activity were primarily guided by living arrangements. While those in cohabiting relationships could potentially continue as before, those who were single or in non-cohabiting relationships generally had restricted opportunities to maintain their sexual relationships. Pornography consumption and digital partners were reported to increase since lockdown. 47 However, online interactions are qualitatively different from in-person interactions and do not provide the same opportunities for physical intimacy.

Recommendations and conclusions

In the sections above we have outlined the ways in which COVID-19 has impacted social relationships, showing how relational mechanisms key to health have been undermined. While some of the damage might well self-repair after the pandemic, there are opportunities inherent in deliberative efforts to build back in ways that facilitate greater resilience in social and community relationships. We conclude by making three recommendations: one regarding public health responses to the pandemic; and two regarding social recovery.

Recommendation 1: explicitly count the relational cost of public health policies to control the pandemic

Effective handling of a pandemic recognises that social, economic and health concerns are intricately interwoven. It is clear that future research and policy attention must focus on the social consequences. As described above, policies which restrict physical mixing across households carry heavy and unequal relational costs. These include for individuals (eg, loss of intimate touch), dyads (eg, loss of warmth, comfort), networks (eg, restricted access to support) and communities (eg, loss of cohesion and identity). Such costs—and their unequal impact—should not be ignored in short-term efforts to control an epidemic. Some public health responses—restrictions on international holiday travel and highly efficient test and trace systems—have relatively small relational costs and should be prioritised. At a national level, an earlier move to proportionate restrictions, and investment in effective test and trace systems, may help prevent escalation of spread to the point where a national lockdown or tight restrictions became an inevitability. Where policies with relational costs are unavoidable, close attention should be paid to the unequal relational impact for those whose personal circumstances differ from normative assumptions of two adult families. This includes consideration of whether expectations are fair (eg, for those who live alone), whether restrictions on social events are equitable across age group, religious/ethnic groupings and social class, and also to ensure that the language promoted by such policies (eg, households; families) is not exclusionary. 48 49 Forethought to unequal impacts on social relationships should thus be integral to the work of epidemic preparedness teams.

Recommendation 2: intelligently balance online and offline ways of relating

A key ingredient for well-being is ‘getting together’ in a physical sense. This is fundamental to a human need for intimate touch, physical comfort, reinforcing interactional norms and providing practical support. Emerging evidence suggests that online ways of relating cannot simply replace physical interactions. But online interaction has many benefits and for some it offers connections that did not exist previously. In particular, online platforms provide new forms of support for those unable to access offline services because of mobility issues (eg, older people) or because they are geographically isolated from their support community (eg, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) youth). Ultimately, multiple forms of online and offline social interactions are required to meet the needs of varying groups of people (eg, LGBTQ, older people). Future research and practice should aim to establish ways of using offline and online support in complementary and even synergistic ways, rather than veering between them as social restrictions expand and contract. Intelligent balancing of online and offline ways of relating also pertains to future policies on home and flexible working. A decision to switch to wholesale or obligatory homeworking should consider the risk to relational ‘group properties’ of the workplace community and their impact on employees’ well-being, focusing in particular on unequal impacts (eg, new vs established employees). Intelligent blending of online and in-person working is required to achieve flexibility while also nurturing supportive networks at work. Intelligent balance also implies strategies to build digital literacy and minimise digital exclusion, as well as coproducing solutions with intended beneficiaries.

Recommendation 3: build stronger and sustainable localised communities

In balancing offline and online ways of interacting, there is opportunity to capitalise on the potential for more localised, coherent communities due to scaled-down travel, homeworking and local focus that will ideally continue after restrictions end. There are potential economic benefits after the pandemic, such as increased trade as home workers use local resources (eg, coffee shops), but also relational benefits from stronger relationships around the orbit of the home and neighbourhood. Experience from previous crises shows that community volunteer efforts generated early on will wane over time in the absence of deliberate work to maintain them. Adequately funded partnerships between local government, third sector and community groups are required to sustain community assets that began as a direct response to the pandemic. Such partnerships could work to secure green spaces and indoor (non-commercial) meeting spaces that promote community interaction. Green spaces in particular provide a triple benefit in encouraging physical activity and mental health, as well as facilitating social bonding. 50 In building local communities, small community networks—that allow for diversity and break down ingroup/outgroup views—may be more helpful than the concept of ‘support bubbles’, which are exclusionary and less sustainable in the longer term. Rigorously designed intervention and evaluation—taking a systems approach—will be crucial in ensuring scale-up and sustainability.

The dramatic change to social interaction necessitated by efforts to control the spread of COVID-19 created stark challenges but also opportunities. Our essay highlights opportunities for learning, both to ensure the equity and humanity of physical restrictions, and to sustain the salutogenic effects of social relationships going forward. The starting point for capitalising on this learning is recognition of the disruption to relational mechanisms as a key part of the socioeconomic and health impact of the pandemic. In recovery planning, a general rule is that what is good for decreasing health inequalities (such as expanding social protection and public services and pursuing green inclusive growth strategies) 4 will also benefit relationships and safeguard relational mechanisms for future generations. Putting this into action will require political will.

Ethics statements

Patient consent for publication.

Not required.

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Twitter @karenmaxSPHSU, @Mark_McCann, @Rwilsonlowe, @KMitchinGlasgow

Contributors EL and KM led on the manuscript conceptualisation, review and editing. SP, KM, CB, RBP, RL, MM, JR, KS and RW-L contributed to drafting and revising the article. All authors assisted in revising the final draft.

Funding The research reported in this publication was supported by the Medical Research Council (MC_UU_00022/1, MC_UU_00022/3) and the Chief Scientist Office (SPHSU11, SPHSU14). EL is also supported by MRC Skills Development Fellowship Award (MR/S015078/1). KS and MM are also supported by a Medical Research Council Strategic Award (MC_PC_13027).

Competing interests None declared.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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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.

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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.

Veterinary Doctor

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Hospital Administrator

The hospital Administrator is in charge of organising and supervising the daily operations of medical services and facilities. This organising includes managing of organisation’s staff and its members in service, budgets, service reports, departmental reporting and taking reminders of patient care and services.

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.

Videographer

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Linguistic meaning is related to language or Linguistics which is the study of languages. A career as a linguistic meaning, a profession that is based on the scientific study of language, and it's a very broad field with many specialities. Famous linguists work in academia, researching and teaching different areas of language, such as phonetics (sounds), syntax (word order) and semantics (meaning). 

Other researchers focus on specialities like computational linguistics, which seeks to better match human and computer language capacities, or applied linguistics, which is concerned with improving language education. Still, others work as language experts for the government, advertising companies, dictionary publishers and various other private enterprises. Some might work from home as freelance linguists. Philologist, phonologist, and dialectician are some of Linguist synonym. Linguists can study French , German , Italian . 

Public Relation Executive

Travel journalist.

The career of a travel journalist is full of passion, excitement and responsibility. Journalism as a career could be challenging at times, but if you're someone who has been genuinely enthusiastic about all this, then it is the best decision for you. Travel journalism jobs are all about insightful, artfully written, informative narratives designed to cover the travel industry. Travel Journalist is someone who explores, gathers and presents information as a news article.

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

Merchandiser.

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. 

Metallurgical Engineer

A metallurgical engineer is a professional who studies and produces materials that bring power to our world. He or she extracts metals from ores and rocks and transforms them into alloys, high-purity metals and other materials used in developing infrastructure, transportation and healthcare equipment. 

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. 

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. 

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.

ITSM Manager

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 

Business Intelligence Developer

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Understanding and combating COVID-19 using the biology and chemistry of SARS-CoV-2

Mohammad mansoob khan.

1 Chemical Sciences, Faculty of Science, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Jalan Tungku Link, Gadong, 1410 BE Brunei Darussalam

Yea-Wen Goh

Norhayati ahmad.

2 Environmental and Life Sciences, Faculty of Science, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Jalan Tungku Link, Gadong, 1410 BE Brunei Darussalam

3 Institute for Biodiversity and Environmental Research, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Jalan Tunku Link, Gadong, 1410 BE Brunei Darussalam

Monowarul Mobin Siddique

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Symptoms of COVID-19 can range from asymptomatic to severe, which could lead to fatality. Like other pathogenic viruses, the infection of SARS-CoV-2 relies on binding its spike glycoprotein to the host receptor angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE 2). Molecular studies suggested that there is a high affinity between the spike glycoprotein and ACE 2 that might arise due to their hydrophobic interaction. This property is mainly responsible for making this virus highly infectious. Apart from this, the transmissibility of the virus, prolonged viability in certain circumstances, and rapid mutations also contributed to the current pandemic situation. Nanotechnology provides potential alternative solutions to combat COVID-19 with the development of i. nanomaterial-based COVID-19 detection technology, ii. nanomaterial-based disinfectants, iii. nanoparticle-based vaccines, and iv. nanoparticle-based drug delivery. Hence, this review provides diverse insight into understanding COVID-19.

Introduction

Coronaviruses (CoVs) belong to the family Coronaviridae in the order of Nidovirales, which are positive-sensed single-stranded RNA viruses (+ ssRNA) surrounded by an envelope [ 1 – 4 ]. The name “Corona” stands for ‘crown’ in Latin, given due to the distinctive crown-like appearance of their spike proteins, which allow the virus to interact with the host cell receptors, a key step necessary to penetrate the host cell surface. This group of viruses is sub-divided based on the difference in the protein sequence into four genera: Alphacoronavirus, Betacoronavirus, Gammacoronavirus, and Deltacoronavirus (Fig.  1 ) [ 3 – 6 ].

Classification of human coronaviruses, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2

Alpha- and Betacoronaviruses are known to infect humans that include seven types of coronaviruses: i. HCoV-229E, ii. HCoV-NL63, iii. HCoV-OC43, iv. HCoV-HKU1, v. SARS-CoV, vi. MERS-CoV, and vii. SARS-CoV-2 [ 3 , 4 , 7 ]. HCoV stands for human coronavirus where HCoV-229E and HCoV-NL63 are alpha-CoVs while HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-HKU1 are beta-CoVs. These human coronaviruses usually cause mild symptoms such as the common cold (or acute rhinitis) or gastrointestinal infection, which causes diarrhea [ 3 ]. In contrast, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2, which are beta-CoVs, are highly transmittable and pathogenic, causing a higher chance for patients to develop severe acute respiratory infections like pneumonia [ 3 ]. According to epidemiological data, SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV are zoonotic pathogens that can be transmitted between animals and humans during close interaction [ 3 , 6 ]. In 2002, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak caused by SARS-CoV in Guangdong Province of China was identified to be transmitted from bats to humans via civet cats as the intermediate host [ 8 ]. A decade later in 2012, the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) outbreak caused by MERS-CoV from Saudi Arabia was investigated to be from camels to humans [ 3 , 6 ].

In December 2019, Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province of China, experienced an outbreak of unidentified pneumonia disease associated with a novel coronavirus (nCoV) [ 4 ]. The term nCoV is a provisional name given to the new strain of coronavirus, which has not previously been identified in humans. This new strain of the virus was initially referred to as 2019-nCoV before it was named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SAR-CoV-2) by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) [ 1 , 6 ]. This name was chosen because the virus is genetically related to SAR-CoV which caused the SARS outbreak back in 2002. On the 11th of February 2020, the name of the disease caused by SAR-CoV-2 was announced as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) by the World Health Organization (WHO). The World Health Organization (WHO) then declared the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak a pandemic on the 11th March 2020. Coming from the beta-CoV genus, SAR-CoV-2, the seventh strain of human coronavirus, is the third zoonotic CoV after SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV [ 1 , 8 ]. The source of COVID-19, however, is still actively being investigated, although initial studies have shown that the CoVs found in bats and pangolins are highly related to SAR-CoV-2 [ 8 ]. This is because neither of the CoVs found in these mammals is sufficiently genetically similar to serve as its direct reservoir [ 8 ].

According to WHO, as of 1st July 2022, there have been more than 545 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, including more than 6 million deaths. Previously, there were four SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOC) which are i. Alpha (B.1.1.7), ii. Beta (B.1.351), iii. Gamma (P.1), and iv. Delta (B.1.617.2) (Table ​ (Table1). 1 ). However, on 26th November 2021, WHO classified a new variant of concern which was first reported by scientists in South Africa, known as the Omicron variant (B.1.1.529). Subsequently, Omicron is currently the dominant variant circulating globally. These are caused by mutations, especially in the spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD) that enhances viral replication in the upper respiratory tract and in vivo transmission [ 9 ]. It was reported that Omicron possesses the most mutation sites and the mutations in its spike protein were approximately three to four times greater than the four previously circulating VOCs [ 10 , 11 ]. Weng et al . reported that the Omicron variant had 50 consensus mutations, while Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta had 22, 18, 23, and 29 mutations, respectively [ 11 , 12 ]. These mutations have also shown increased infectivity and antibody resistance [ 13 ]. In addition, variants that were previously classified as variants of interest (VOI) include i. Epsilon (B.1.427 and B.1.429), ii. Zeta (P.2), iii. Eta (B.1.525), iv. Theta (P.3), v. Iota (B.1.526), vi. Kappa (B.1.617.1), vii. Lambda (C.37), and viii. Mu (B.1.621) (Table ​ (Table1 1 ).

Classification of SARS-CoV-2 variants as of 7th June 2022 by the World Health Organization [ 14 ]

The current estimated incubation period for SARS-CoV-2 is 5–6 days [ 15 ] or even shorter for the Omicron variant [ 16 ]. However, it can also take up to 14 days for an infected individual to develop symptoms [ 15 ]. Symptoms of COVID-19 can range from asymptomatic to severe (acute respiratory infections and intestinal infections), which could lead to fatality. However, the most common symptoms reported are i. fever, ii. fatigue, iii. dry cough, iv. loss of smell or taste, and v. sore throat [ 17 ]. Researchers have found that pre-existing health conditions such as high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes in patients can enhance the severity of the disease and susceptibility to infection. Furthermore, post-COVID-19 symptoms or long COVID was also reported by a significant number of patients who have recovered from COVID-19 infection [ 17 , 18 ]. These are symptoms such as i. fatigue, ii. shortness of breath, and iii. cognitive dysfunction (e.g., lack of mental focus and clarity, confusion, and forgetfulness) which persist for more than 12 weeks from initial symptoms [ 17 , 18 ].

Different areas of chemistry and biology play a key role in understanding everything from the structure and pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 to preventive measures and treatment for COVID-19. Biochemistry, for instance, helps us understand the structure of SARS-CoV-2, its viral proteins, viral genome, and pathogenic mechanisms [ 19 ]. On the other hand, organic and pharmaceutical chemistry plays a crucial role in identifying potential antiviral drugs, synthesizing antiviral compounds, and developing effective antiviral drugs against COVID-19 [ 19 ]. Furthermore, biomaterial chemistry and nanotechnology aid in the research and development of better diagnosis, preventive measures, and drug delivery system using nanomaterials for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 [ 19 , 20 ]. The efficiency of drug delivery, for instance, can be improved with the different types of nanostructures which include i. metallic nanoparticles, ii. liposomes, iii. fullerenes, iv. graphene, v. carbon nanoparticles, and vi. polymeric nanoparticles [ 20 ].

Structure of SARS-CoV-2

Biochemistry plays a crucial role in understanding the structure of SARS-CoV-2. The structure of SARS-CoV-2 consists of i. a positive-sensed single-stranded RNA genome (+ ssRNA), ii. a lipid-bilayer viral membrane, iii. nucleocapsid (N) proteins, iv. membrane (M) proteins, v. spike (S) glycoproteins, and vi. envelope (E) proteins (Fig.  2 ) [ 19 , 21 ]. The single-stranded RNA genome is composed of 30,000 nucleotides which encode for four structural proteins (N protein, M protein, E protein, and S glycoprotein) and non-structural proteins (NsPs) such as 3-chymotrypsin-like protease (3CL pro ), papain-like protease (PL pro ), helicase (H), and RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) [ 2 , 5 , 19 ]. N protein functions to encapsulate and protect the single-stranded RNA genome. M protein supports the viral assembly and is responsible for the shape of the viral membrane. In contrast, E protein has a crucial role in virus assembly, envelope formation, host cell membrane permeability and virulence [ 5 , 19 ]. The S glycoprotein comprises an S1 and S2 subunit in each spike monomer which is responsible for binding to the host cell receptor and fusion of the viral and cellular membranes, respectively [ 22 – 24 ]. Therefore, the S1 subunit which recognizes the protein receptor is called the receptor-binding domain (RBD) [ 19 ]. Furthermore, S protein is the main antigen component in all structural proteins that interact with the host cell receptors angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE 2) [ 22 – 24 ]. ACE 2 is a zinc-dependent metalloenzyme present in the lungs (type II alveoli cells), gastrointestinal (GI) tract, kidneys, and blood vessels [ 25 ]. This may suggest that enhanced binding between S protein of SARS-CoV-2 and ACE 2 may be responsible for increased disease severity (respiratory infection or GI infection) and high transmission rate of COVID-19.

Schematic drawing of the SARS-CoV-2 structure showing the single-stranded RNA genome (ssRNA), nucleocapsid (N) protein, membrane (M) protein, envelope (E) protein, spike (S) protein, and lipid-bilayer viral membrane

Mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis

As illustrated in Fig.  3 , the S1 subunit of the spike (S) protein of SARS-CoV-2 mediates binding to the receptors’ angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE 2) to enter the host cell [ 22 – 24 ]. The transmembrane serine protease TMPRSS2 then releases the S2 subunit of the S protein to fuse SARS-CoV-2 with the host cellular membrane [ 21 , 26 ]. After the entry into the host cell (endocytosis), the viral positive-sense single-stranded RNA (+ ssRNA) is released into the cytosol, where ribosomes translate it into two large polypeptides known as pp1a and pp1ab [ 2 , 19 , 27 ]. These two large polypeptides are then transformed into mature non-structural proteins (NsPs) such as RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) and structural viral proteins (S, M, N, and E proteins) by two viral proteases: i. 3-chymotrypsin-like cysteine protease (3CL pro ) which is the main protease and ii. papain-like protease (PL pro ) [ 19 , 21 ]. RdRp mediates RNA replication, which causes multiple copies of the genome to be produced. Hence, more SARS-CoV-2 is generated as NsPs and the replicated viral genome self-assembles. Lastly, these synthesized virions are then secreted out (by exocytosis) from the infected cell, infecting other host cells.

Molecular interaction between SARS-CoV-2 and ACE2 receptor

Physical forces like i. hydrophobic effect, ii. electrostatic forces, iii. van der Waals forces, iv. hydrogen bonding, v. ionic bonding, and vi. entropy plays a crucial role in understanding protein–protein interactions. The binding interactions between the S protein of SARS-CoV-2 and ACE 2 receptor can be studied by using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, which is a computer simulation method to analyze the physical movements of atoms and molecules, and the Monte Carlo (MC) sampling approach. Research by Li et al . has found that hydrogen bond pairing does not dominate the interaction between SARS-CoV-2 and ACE 2, as only several hydrogen bonds were identified [ 28 ]. However, simulation results of the hydration layer by using the MD method showed the existence of a large area of hydrophobic surfaces on SARS-CoV-2 RBD and ACE 2 [ 28 ]. This result suggests that the high affinity between SARS-CoV-2 and ACE 2 may be due to the hydrophobic effect among the hydrophobic surface areas of these two proteins at the binding site. Furthermore, a study by a group of computational chemists led by Amin showed that ACE 2 exhibited a negative electrostatic potential at the RBD, while SARS-CoV-2 showed positive electrostatic potential. This study has also found that mutations in the S protein of SAR-CoV-2 cause enhanced affinity toward ACE 2 due to the increase in electrostatic interactions [ 19 , 22 , 29 ].

Transmission routes of SARS-CoV-2

The transmission of SARS-CoV-2 can be spread through three major routes: i. droplet transmission, ii. aerosol transmission, and iii. contact transmission [ 5 , 30 ]. Droplet transmission is the spread caused by respiratory water droplets carrying the virus via coughing and sneezing. Similarly, aerosol transmission spreads fine, infectious respiratory water droplet nuclei that sustain in the air and can be inhaled directly into the lower respiratory tract. On the other hand, contact transmission can be either direct (direct contact with an infected person) or indirect (contact with virus-contaminated surfaces). Door knobs, handrails, and lift buttons, for instance, are common virus-contaminated surfaces that may cause indirect contact transmission. Adsorption of SARS-CoV-2 to these surfaces can be further facilitated by van der Waals and electrostatic attractions [ 31 ].

Persistence and viability of SARS-CoV-2 on different surfaces

Enveloped viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 can survive on inanimate surfaces. The quantity of adsorbed viruses is influenced by surface charge, size, stability, and steric conformation of the virus’s outer surface proteins. Moreover, the persistence and viability of SARS-CoV-2 differ with the characteristics of the inanimate surfaces, surface proteins, and environmental conditions such as relative humidity, pH, and temperature [ 5 , 31 ]. Studies have shown that SARS-CoV-2 has longer viability on plastics, glass, metals (stainless steel and zinc), latex, paper, and cardboard pieces [ 5 , 31 , 32 ]. Regarding this, Chin et al . reported that at 22 °C and 65% relative humidity, SARS-CoV-2 retained its infectivity for 4 days on plastics and stainless steel [ 33 ]. However, under the same temperature and relative humidity, SARS-CoV-2 retained its infectivity on paper for only 30 min (Table ​ (Table2) 2 ) [ 33 ]. On the other hand, SARS-CoV-2 could also have different survivability on a single surface at different temperatures and relative humidity. Research by Biryukov et al . observed that SARS-CoV-2 decayed more rapidly when temperature and relative humidity increased, and the type of inanimate surface did not impact the decay rate [ 32 ].

Persistence and time for complete inactivation of SARS-CoV-2 on different surfaces at 22 °C and 65% relative humidity [ 33 ]

Diagnostic testing for SARS-CoV-2

Detection of SARS-CoV-2 is part of a necessary process to reduce community spread, especially by identifying asymptomatic infected individuals to be isolated. The types of specimens to be collected for SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic testing are i. upper respiratory specimen (e.g., nasopharyngeal or oropharyngeal), ii. lower respiratory specimen (e.g., sputum or lavage), iii. rectal swabs, or iv. blood (including serum and plasma). According to WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines, a nasopharyngeal swab (upper respiratory specimen) is the preferred specimen required for detecting SARS-CoV-2 [ 34 ]. However, saliva is also an alternative specimen that has been considered for SARS-CoV-2 detection [ 34 ]. Nasopharyngeal specimen is the mucous secretion collected by cotton swab from the nasopharynx. Upon collection, the swab is placed immediately into a sterile tube containing a viral transport medium. Currently, there are several types of diagnostic testing methods, which include i. nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT) such as real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), ii. rapid antigen tests (RATs), and iii. SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests [ 21 , 34 ].

Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction

Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is a type of nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT) that amplifies viral nucleic acids until they are at detectable levels. Hence, it is the most reliable and standard diagnostic method for SARS-CoV-2 due to its high sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. However, RT-PCR testing is time-consuming and requires expensive laboratory instruments, reagents, and skilled laboratory personnel [ 34 ]. In addition, this technique detects the presence of SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acids based on specific genes such as S, E, N, and RdRP genes in specimens of the infected individual [ 35 , 36 ]. RT-PCR involves five steps which include i. specimen collection, ii. sample storage at 2–8 °C, iii. RNA extraction and purification using silica or magnetic particle-based methods, iv. reverse transcription of the viral RNA to a single-stranded complementary DNA (cDNA) using reverse transcriptase enzyme, and v. real-time detection of the fluorescent signals during the amplification of the specific genes of gene fragments [ 34 , 35 ].

Rapid antigen test

Rapid antigen test (RATs), detects the presence of viral proteins (antigens) expressed by SARS-CoV-2 in nasopharyngeal or oropharyngeal specimens of the infected individual [ 35 ]. The technology for RATs is similar to that of a pregnancy test, as the presence of these antigens will be shown by a fluorescent or colored band on the test strip (Fig.  4 ) [ 34 ]. Since it is a cheap and rapid technique, this diagnostic method is currently available as at-home test kits. However, this method produces a higher rate of false negative results, as it can only detect antigens (viral protein) if the virus is actively replicating [ 35 ].

Rapid antigen test kit showing negative and positive signs

Antibody test

On the other hand, an antibody test which is a serology test is a method to test for past infections. It is an indirect test in detecting SARS-CoV-2, as this technique detects the antibodies produced specifically in response to fight with SARS-CoV-2. This is a quick method to detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, but this cannot confirm the active infection status of an individual.

Preventive measures

Prevention of infection is a major strategy to slow down the spread of COVID-19. Interventions such as social distancing, personal protective equipment (PPE), and chemical sanitizations are examples of COVID-19 preventive measures. PPE is a garment or equipment that protects the user against any health or safety risk. The most commonly used PPE for respiratory and body protection during the pandemic includes masks or respirators, gloves, gown/aprons, goggles, and face shields [ 37 ]. However, the choice of PPE and level of protection for the general public and health-care workers during this COVID-19 pandemic is based on the risk of exposure. On the other hand, usage of soap water, hand sanitizers, and disinfecting inanimate surfaces with chemicals (e.g., bleach and hydrogen peroxide) are examples of chemical inactivation and preventive measures.

Face masks cover the users’ nose and mouth, which act as physical barriers that prevent respiratory droplets transmission. It protects a healthy person from getting infected and also prevents onward transmission by an infected person. Therefore, the usage of face masks has become a worldwide health-care necessity during this COVID-19 pandemic. Masks are divided into three categories which include i. fabric face masks, ii. medical or surgical masks, and iii. respirators. Polymers such as polypropylene (PP), polyethylene, polyesters, polyamides, polycarbonates, and polyphenylene oxide are usually used for fibers in medical masks and medical respirators due to their hydrophobic and nonabsorbent properties [ 38 ]. Furthermore, WHO has developed specific guidelines and strategies on infection prevention and control (IPC). According to WHO, medical masks are recommended for health-care workers in clinical settings, people with mild symptoms (e.g., fatigue, slight cough, and sore throat), people with chronic health conditions (e.g., obesity, diabetes, cancer, chronic respiratory disease, and cardiovascular disease), patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19, and home caregivers for suspected or confirmed COVID-19 patients. On the other hand, non-medical or fabric masks can be used by the general public under the age of 60 years with no health conditions. In general, face masks should possess five characteristics: i. particulate filtration efficiency (PFE), ii. bacterial filtration efficiency (BFE), iii. fluid resistance, iv. differential pressure, and v. flammability [ 30 ]. In addition, the four main characteristics which determine the mask performance are i. filtration, ii. breathability, iii. fit, and iv. performance under different environmental conditions [ 39 ].

A medical/surgical mask is most widely and commonly used by health-care workers and the general public. Medical/surgical masks are fluid-resistant disposable masks that can filter particles of size 0.04–1.3 μm [ 40 ]. It covers the nose and mouth of the user, but is not designed to seal tightly against the user’s face [ 30 , 37 , 41 ]. As a result, they are not able to completely protect the user against airborne infectious agents such as coronavirus. Surgical masks usually consist of either three layers (3-ply) or four layers (4-ply). A three-ply surgical mask consists of three layers: i. an exterior hydrophobic layer, ii. a central filter layer, and iii. internal tender moisture-absorbing layer [ 41 ]. The function of the first layer is to repel water droplets; the second layer filters out germs and aerosols, while the third layer absorbs moisture from the user. A four-ply surgical mask is similar to a three-ply surgical mask, but with an additional central filtering layer or activated carbon filter [ 41 ]. In addition, the most commonly used material to make these medical masks is non-woven polypropylene (PP) as it is hydrophobic, nontoxic, breathable, inexpensive, provides filtration, and does not absorb humidity [ 30 , 38 ]. Furthermore, its filtering mechanism is based on Brownian diffusion, entrapment, inertial collision, gravity sedimentation, and electrostatic adsorption [ 42 ].

Respirators, which are also known as filtering facepiece respirators (FFR), seal tightly against the user’s face and are capable of protecting the user from infectious agents [ 41 ]. Surgical N95 respirators, for instance, is the most widely used surgical respirators, especially by health-care workers. It is a CDC/National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)-certified disposable half-mask filtering facepiece respirator that has 95% or above filtering efficiency for particle size of about 0.3 μm [ 38 , 40 ]. Furthermore, it is effective in filtering non-oily particles such as coronaviruses as “N” means that the respirator is not resistant to oil [ 41 ]. It compises four layers which include i. a hydrophobic non-woven polypropylene (PP) outer later, ii. two layers of melt-blown non-woven PP, iii. a modacrylic support layer, and iv. a hydrophobic non-woven PP (Fig.  5 ) [ 30 , 38 ]. The filter layers operate on four principles, which are i. inertial impaction, ii. interception, iii. diffusion, and iv. electrostatic attraction [ 30 ].

Four layers of an N95 mask

Chemicals used for prevention of SARS-CoV-2

Usage of soap which is a surfactant is an effective way of killing SARS-CoV-2. Surfactant (surface-active agents) molecules are sodium salt with a long chain of fatty acids known as amphiphile [ 19 ]. Amphiphile consists of two parts: i. fat-like long-chain tail, which is hydrophobic, and ii. a COO − Na + head, which is hydrophilic or lyophobic. Due to hydrophobic interactions, when soap is dissolved in water, the molecules would arrange in such a way as to form micelles (Fig.  6 a) [ 19 ]. As the lipophilic tails are oriented inward, any dirt on our skin will be trapped to be rinsed away along with water. As shown in Fig.  6 b, the lipid-bilayer membrane of SARS-CoV-2 is structurally similar to amphiphiles found on surfactant molecules. The connection of lipids in the viral membrane is the weakest connection due to the structure of the virus being self-assembled [ 19 ]. Hence, some surfactant molecules will compete with the lipids and attach to the viral membrane. This is done by bonding its hydrophilic head with water, while its lipophilic tail bonds to the lipid resulting in push–pull interactions that eventually break the viral membrane [ 19 ]. As SARS-CoV-2 structurally falls apart, the fragments of the virus get trapped in the micelle and get washed away with water. Furthermore, WHO guidelines recommend frequent hand washing with soap and water for at least 20 s to effectively prevent the disease [ 43 ].

a Hydrophobic tails of amphiphile faces inward to form micelle which traps dirt and b structure of amphiphile and lipid on the lipid-bilayer membrane of SARS-CoV-2

Alcohol-based hand sanitizers

In addition to soap and water, the usage of rubbing alcohol or alcohol-based hand sanitizer is also an effective alternative way to kill SARS-CoV-2 when soap water is inaccessible. The components of alcohol-based hand sanitizers are i. alcohol (ethyl alcohol or isopropanol), ii. water, iii. glycerol, and iv. hydrogen peroxide. Among the four components, alcohol plays a crucial role in destroying SARS-CoV-2. In a recent study, two standardized World Health Organization formulae are known as WHO formulation 1, which consists of 85% ethanol, and WHO formulation 2, which consists of 75% isopropanol, were proven to be efficient in inactivating SARS-CoV-2 [ 44 – 46 ]. This is because enveloped viruses like SARS-CoV-2 are highly sensitive toward these alcohols, as they can dissolve the lipid molecules of the viral membrane which inactivates the virus as its structure collapses (Fig.  7 ) [ 19 , 43 , 44 , 47 ]. Alcohols are also amphiphilic compounds similar to lipid molecules. Therefore, they possess both hydrophilic and hydrophobic (or lipophilic) properties, allowing them to enter through the lipid-bilayer viral envelope, which leads to alteration in its fluidity. This is because the presence of polar oxygen atoms from alcohols increases the internal affinity of the membrane for water [ 43 ]. Thus, its protein structures are also destabilized and denatured, causing the virus to lose its biological activities and hence inactivated [ 19 , 43 ].

Antiviral action and mechanism of alcohol against enveloped viruses like SARS-CoV-2 [ 43 ]

Vaccines against COVID-19

Seven different classes of vaccines developed against SARS-CoV-2, which are i. messenger RNA (mRNA), ii. DNA, iii. inactivated viruses, iv. viral vector (non-replicating and replicating), v. protein subunit, vi. viral-like particles, and, vii. live attenuated [ 48 , 49 ]. Currently, there are different types of authorized vaccines used against SARS-CoV-2, which include i. BNT162b2 vaccine by Pfizer and BioNTech, ii. mRNA-1273 vaccine by Moderna, iii . AZD1222 by AstraZeneca and University of Oxford, iv. CoronaVac by Sinovac, v. BBIBP-CorV by Sinopharm, and, vi. JNJ-78436735 by Janssen Pharmaceuticals Companies of Johnson and Johnson (Table ​ (Table3) 3 ) [ 49 , 50 ]. These vaccines remove the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to cause severe symptoms of COVID-19, hospitalization, intensive care unit admission, and death. However, these vaccines may cause short-lived side effects such as i. pain at the injection site, ii. headache, iii. mild fever, iv. fatigue, and v. chills. These side effects could be more pronounced after the second dose, but usually resolve within 24–72 h. In addition, these vaccines should also be given to individuals who had a history of asymptomatic or symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection after 90 days [ 48 ].

Authorized COVID-19 vaccines [ 48 – 50 ]

Messenger RNA

Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines are a new type of vaccine technology that has been scientifically relevant since early in the twenty-first century. These vaccines can be developed rapidly and are cost efficient. Both BNT162b2 by Pfizer and BioNTech and mRNA-1273 by Moderna are examples of authorized mRNA vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 [ 48 , 51 ]. These vaccines are cationic lipid nanoparticles-encapsulated (LNP) mRNA of the SARS-CoV-2 expressing spike (S) proteins, which are unable to cause disease [ 48 , 49 , 52 ]. The lipid nanoparticle barrier functions to protect the mRNA, which is easily broken down. Next, these modified mRNA provide genetic instructions for human cells to produce the spike (S) proteins that cause an immune response, eliciting the production of antibodies, CD4  +  and CD8  +  T cells [ 51 ]. Hence, the body will be able to develop a certain degree of immunity against SARS-CoV-2. BNT162b2 vaccine, for instance, requires two doses given 3 weeks apart and has an efficacy rate of 95%, 7 days after a double dose [ 48 , 49 , 52 , 53 ]. However, dealing with BNT162b2 is challenging in rural areas, since the storage temperature of this vaccine is − 70 °C and the undiluted vials can only be stored at room temperature for not more than 2 h [ 48 , 54 ]. In addition, the BNT162b2 vaccine is approved for the age group of 16 years and older [ 48 ]. mRNA-1273, on the other hand, also requires two doses given 4 weeks apart. It has an efficacy rate of 94.1%, 14 days after the second dose [ 48 , 52 ]. mRNA-1273 is recommended for the age group of 18 years and above [ 54 ]. Furthermore, mRNA-1273 can be stored for 30 days between 2 and 8 °C [ 54 ].

There are differences in the number of doses required for different COVID-19 vaccines to reach their maximum level of protection against the virus. Two doses of these mRNA vaccines have been shown to significantly reduce the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infections and severe COVID-19 symptoms. However, COVID-19 vaccine boosters or additional doses are also required to further enhance and restore protection, which has been decreased over time after previous primary vaccinations, especially when Omicron is currently causing surges around the world. A study conducted by Edara et al . using serum from mRNA-vaccinated individuals showed that at 2–4 weeks after the primary series of vaccinations, a 30-fold reduction in neutralizing activity against Omicron (B.1.1.529) was observed [ 55 ]. In addition, their findings also showed that the majority of the naive vaccinated individuals have lost detectable neutralizing antibodies against Omicron (B1.1.529) after 6 months [ 55 ]. Hence, CDC recommends a booster of either BNT162b2 by Pfizer and BioNTech or mRNA-1273 by Moderna for the age group of 5 years and older after completing their primary series of vaccinations. A second booster, on the other hand, is recommended for adults of age 50 years and older and individuals of age 12 years and older with moderately or severely impaired immune systems. However, a study by Korves et al . reported that booster vaccine effectiveness for mRNA vaccines has shown lower vaccine effectiveness against infection with Omicron than Delta with 54% and 70% reduction in infection during Omicron and Delta predominance, respectively [ 56 ].

Inactivated virus

Inactivated virus vaccines against COVID-19 are a type of vaccine which contains inactivated SARS-CoV-2 through physical, chemical, or radiation processes, and hence are unable to replicate and cause disease [ 52 , 57 ]. BBIBP-CorV manufactured by Sinopharm Group in association with Beijing Institute of Biological Products and CoronaVac vaccine by Sinovac Biotech are both approved inactivated vaccines used by many countries against SARS-CoV-2 [ 48 , 49 , 57 ]. BBIBP-CorV, for instance, requires two doses to be given 3 weeks apart. It has an efficacy rate of 79.34% and 86% in China and the UAE, respectively [ 48 ]. The CoronaVac vaccine is a formalin-inactivated and alum adjuvanted vaccine [ 49 ]. It also requires two doses to be given 2 weeks apart and has been reported to have 50.38% efficacy. In addition, both vaccines should be stored and transported in the refrigerator at 2–8 °C.

Viral vector

The AZD1222 vaccine manufactured by AstraZeneca in collaboration with Oxford University is one of the authorized vector vaccines against COVID-19. It utilizes the non-replicating chimpanzee adenoviral vector ChAdOx1 with the double-stranded DNA segment of the RNA, which codes for the S protein antigen of SARS-CoV-2 [ 48 , 49 , 52 , 58 ]. AZD1222 should be given to individuals of age 18 years and older in two doses with an interval of 4–12 weeks [ 48 ]. JNJ-78436735 manufactured by Janssen Pharmaceuticals Companies of Johnson and Johnson, on the other hand, utilizes adenovirus type 26 (Ad26) vector carrying the S gene of SARS-CoV-2, which was also used for the development of Ebola vaccine [ 48 , 52 ]. It is a one-dose vaccine for individuals aged > 18 years old with 66% efficacy globally [ 48 ]. Furthermore, this vaccine is safe to be administered for pregnant women who may develop more severe COVID-19 symptoms [ 50 ].

Therapeutic approaches

Although vaccines are developed and authorized for protection against hospitalizations and deaths, there have still been major vaccine breakthroughs due to the constant viral mutations. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop more effective treatments and drugs to mitigate the current pandemic. Currently, some repurposed drugs are being used to reduce the complications of COVID-19 based on their symptoms. Research has suggested that antiviral medicines such as remdesivir (RDV) are most effective in the early stages of COVID-19 when the patient’s immune system is challenged to prevent the replication of SARS-CoV-2 [ 50 ]. In contrast, immunosuppressive or anti-inflammatory drugs are more effective in the acute stages of COVID-19 when the patient is experiencing tissue damages due to severe immune or inflammatory reactions [ 50 ]. Hence, certain promising antiviral drugs have been authorized for the treatment of COVID-19, which include i. remdesivir, ii. molnupiravir, and iii. PAXLOVID™.

Remdesivir (RDV), which was developed to treat Ebola, is an antiviral drug act as a nucleoside analog and inhibits the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) enzyme of SARS-CoV-2 [ 21 , 59 ]. It is the first antiviral drug approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat COVID-19 patients [ 59 ]. Remdesivir is given to patients by intravenous (IV) administration. The recommended dosage for remdesivir is 200 mg IV once, followed by 100 mg IV once daily for 4 days [ 60 ]. However, treatment may be extended to 10 days if there is no improvement in recovery by day 5 [ 60 ]. Furthermore, its structure is composed of three fragments which include i. nucleobase (adenine) derivative, ii. pentose sugar, and iii. phosphoramidate unit (Fig.  8 ) [ 19 ].

Structure of remdesivir (molecular formula: C 27 H 35 N 6 O 8 P)

In the host cell, remdesivir (prodrug) is converted into the nucleoside derivate GS-441524 (Fig.  9 ). {"type":"entrez-nucleotide","attrs":{"text":"GS441524","term_id":"257561308","term_text":"GS441524"}} GS441524 is an active compound of remdesivir, which targets RdRp and competes with endogenous nucleotides (ATP) at the RdRp for incorporation into viral RNA [ 61 ]. Incorporation of the triphosphate form of remdesivir instead of ATP interrupts viral RNA replication and, thus, inhibits SARS-CoV-2 viral replication [ 61 ].

Structure of GS-441524 (molecular formula: C 12 H 13 N 5 O 4 )

Molnupiravir

Molnupiravir is an orally administered and directly acting antiviral interventional drug developed by Emory University (USA), Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, and Merck [ 62 ]. It was originally developed for the treatment of influenza [ 62 ]. However, molnupiravir, which is a pyrimidine ribonucleoside analog, also acts by inhibiting RdRp of SARS-CoV-2 to induce RNA mutagenesis. First, molnupiravir (C 13 H 19 N 3 O 7 ) (Fig.  10 a) is converted to EIDD-1931 (C 9 H 13 N 3 O 6 ) (Fig.  10 b) in the body and then to EIDD-1931-triphosphate (C 9 H 16 N 3 O 15 P 3 ) (Fig.  10 c) through phosphorylation by the host kinases [ 62 ]. Next, EIDD-1931-triphosphate acts as an alternate substrate and competes with the endogenous nucleotides at the RdRp enzyme of SARS-CoV-2 [ 62 ]. This causes inhibition of the normal functions of RdRp, causing it to generate mutated RNA copies of SARS-CoV-2 [ 62 ]. Hence, this prevents SARS-CoV-2 to reproduce and spread. Moreover, the reducing property (better electron donor than electron acceptor) of molnupiravir also contributes to its antiviral activity, as it affects the conditions required for viral infection [ 62 ].

a Structure of molnupiravir (molecular formula: C 13 H 19 N 3 O 7 ), b structure of EIDD-1931 (molecular formula: C 9 H 13 N 3 O 6 ), and c structure of EIDD-1931-triphosphate (molecular formula: C 9 H 16 N 3 O 15 P 3 )

PAXLOVID™

PAXLOVID™ is an orally administered antiviral drug developed by Pfizer Inc. It contains nirmatrelvir (PF-07321332) (Fig.  11 a) and ritonavir (Fig.  11 b) [ 63 ]. Both PF-07321332 and ritonavir are protease inhibitors. PF-073321332 works by interacting with 3CL pro , the main protease of SARS-CoV-2. It blocks its ability to transform pp1a and pp1ab into non-structural and structural proteins, which eventually stops the replication process of SARS-CoV-2 [ 64 ]. Furthermore, ritonavir functions as a booster as it slows down the metabolism of PF-073321332 and, hence, allows a higher concentration to remain active in the body for a longer period [ 64 ].

a Structure of nirmatrelvir (PF-07321332) (molecular formula: C 23 H 32 F 3 N 5 O 4 ), and b structure of ritonavir (molecular formula: C 37 H 48 N 6 O 5 S 2 )

Nature-based agents as possible COVID-19 inhibitors

Apart from well-established antiviral drugs in the treatment and inhibition of COVID-19, the possible naturally sourced agents should also be given some attention. Natural products are known to contain a multitude of metabolites with a wide range of therapeutic actions. These natural compounds are known to possess medicinal properties including antiviral activities. The bioactive components reportedly found in plants have been shown to exhibit robust antiviral activity. The isolation, purification, and identification of several phytochemicals from crude extracts have demonstrated antiviral activities such as against POLIO, HIV-1, adenoviruses, hepatitis, and influenza [ 65 ]. Natural products have been tested for coronaviruses and have been shown to show potential in coronavirus treatment [ 66 ].

More recently the BA.5 and BA.4 variants from the Omicron lineage have continued to increase, with the proportion of BA.5 variants increasing globally [ 67 ]. The highly contagious new subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 are driving the next waves of Omicron infections in several countries. There should be a multifaceted strategy to combat this global health pandemic including sourcing drugs from natural products, as they can work through multitargets and elicit their actions via different biochemical mechanisms [ 68 ].

Compounds such as quercetin have been reported to reduce the viral replication of rhinoviruses in infected mice [ 69 ]. More recently, preliminary randomized clinical studies involving quercetin have reported that following treatment of COVID-19 patients with quercetin, a proportion of the patients tested negative for the SARS-CoV-2 virus following a week of treatments with a protein of these patients having their symptoms diminished indicating the [ 70 ]. An in silico study involving about 8000 small molecule candidates has shown that quercetin was among the top candidates for binding with the ACE 2 interface on the S protein. Such binding will eventually reduce the ability of the virus to interact with host cells and thereby reduce the infectability of the virus. Quercetin is known to possess anti-inflammatory activities that might also help to prevent the consequences of the COVID-19 infection. COVID-19 infection triggers a cascade of inflammatory reactions as evident from reports on the elevated levels of cytokines and inflammatory indices such as IL-1β, IL-6, IL-10, and D-dimer in severely ill COVID-19 patients compared to those with moderate symptoms [ 71 ].

In addition, quercetin is a flavonoid that is widely found in several foods, and as some preliminary studies have shown has the potential to be further explored as a potentially useful compound to add to the COVID-19 treatment regime.

Nanotechnology-based approaches for the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of COVID-19

Nanotechnology is a study that encompasses the understanding of diverse disciplines including chemistry, biology, and technology of nanomaterials, which are at dimensions between approximately 1–100 nm [ 20 ]. According to dimensions in the nanoscale, nanostructures are classified into four categories: i. zero-dimensional nanostructures (e.g., fullerene), ii. one-dimensional nanostructures (e.g., nanofibers), iii. two-dimensional nanostructures (e.g., nanofilms, nanolayers, and nanocoatings), and iv. three-dimensional nanostructures (e.g., nanoparticles) [ 20 , 72 ]. The dimensions of these nanostructures determine their functions and applications in nanotechnology [ 72 ]. Nanotechnology has a range of applications such as i. biomolecular detection and diagnostics, ii. therapeutics, iii. DNA sequencing, iv. pharmaceuticals, and v. sensors [ 20 ]. Therefore, it is established that the different fields in nanotechnology can contribute to providing alternative solutions to combat COVID-19. This includes the development of i. nanomaterial-based COVID-19 detection technology, ii. nanomaterial-based disinfectants, iii. new nanoparticle-based vaccines, and iv. nanoparticle-based drug delivery [ 20 , 73 ].

Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) for instance, are nanomaterials that have been investigated for COVID-19 detection. AuNP-based nano-devices use an AuNP-based electrochemical immunosensor for COVID-19 detection [ 73 ]. The biosensor comprises a competitive immunoassay, performed on an array of nanostructured electrodes that are capable of immobilization of different antigens for multiplexed detection [ 73 ]. In addition, an increase in the number of nanostructured electrodes per array chip can also facilitate high-throughput screening of hundreds of samples in a single step which reduces the time and cost associated with the overall assay [ 73 ].

Furthermore, it has been established that SARS-CoV-2 can survive on objects and surfaces ranging from a few hours to a few days. However, currently, the available chemical disinfectants provide only a temporary solution and are harmful and toxic substances to humans. Therefore, the unique physicochemical properties of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) have been widely investigated for their antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2. AgNPs work by releasing Ag + ions, which are nontoxic to humans and have good long-term stability that curbs the growth of viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and prevents proliferation by prohibiting the activity of respiratory system enzymes [ 73 ]. Therefore, Ag + can be sprayed on surfaces such as doorknobs, handrails, and wound dressing for disinfection.

The application of nanoparticles (NPs) in vaccine formulations has a crucial role in the structuring and delivery of vaccines, as they can act as assistants and carriers to deliver antigens to their intended targets [ 73 ]. In addition, NPs also speed up the development of COVID-19 vaccines. Nanoparticle-based delivery approaches have been used in the current mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines such as BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273, as the mRNAs are embedded in lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) [ 48 , 49 , 52 ]. However, these developed vaccines are normally treated through intramuscular injections that can only be operated by health-care professionals and must be stored at low temperature which causes storage and distribution difficulties. Therefore, self-administered nanoparticle-based vaccines (nanovaccines) such as micro-needle patches offer a new approach for protection against SARS-CoV-2 [ 73 ]. Micro-needle patches for COVID-19 are polymer-encapsulated S and N protein-encoding DNA vaccines to stimulate an immune response for SARS-CoV-2 [ 74 ].

There are different types of nanostructured materials that can be used for drug delivery vesicles such as i. metallic nanoparticles, ii. liposomes, iii. fullerenes, iv. graphene, v. carbon nanoparticles, and vi. polymeric nanoparticles [ 20 ]. Liposomes and polymeric nanoparticles, for instance, prolong the drug half-life, improve the solubility of hydrophobic drugs, and reduce potential immunogenicity [ 20 ].

Future outlook

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented loss of human lives worldwide. Despite the continuous global research to understand COVID-19, it has yet to be eradicated. Furthermore, it is well known that the COVID-19 pandemic will not be the last, as there is still a possibility that another zoonotic coronavirus may emerge in the future. Therefore, it is crucial to strengthen global research and development in science and technology with interdisciplinary collaborations. The following are the main future outlooks to understand SARS-CoV-2 better, advance in detecting and preventing SARS-CoV-2 infections, and develop effective treatments for COVID-19.

• SARS-CoV-2 is the third zoonotic coronavirus after SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. Therefore, for future early detection, prevention, and treatment of novel coronaviruses, more research is required to identify and describe the mechanism of these viral mutations to infect humans and their ability to persist in the human population. Especially, information on the mutational trend in the spike protein is important to develop future effective vaccines.
• The knowledge of the origin and reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 remains scarce. Therefore, it is crucial to comprehensively investigate the zoonotic origin and reservoir through multidisciplinary collaboration and carefully coordinated studies to help prepare for future destructive outbreaks caused by novel viruses.
• The ability of asymptomatic patients to spread SARS-CoV-2 has been proven. Therefore, further study on these asymptomatic patients is crucial to discover effective, reliable, and rapid screening methods and improve the accuracy of early diagnosis. Current COVID screening methods imply identifying more reliable early detection markers for such viruses.
• Single-use PPE, which is mostly made of highly hydrophobic and non-degradable materials like polypropylene, causes environmental pollution and ecosystem damage. Hence, to address the impacts of single-use PPE on the environment, more research on sustainable materials should be carried out to develop PPE that can be disinfected and reused without losing its protective properties.
• Traditional disinfecting method (e.g., soap water and alcohol-based sanitizers) is a temporary solution to prevent indirect contact transmission from virus-contaminated surfaces. Hence, more research on nanocoating materials plays a leading role in developing a novel surface disinfection approach. The use of environmentally friendly natural products is an alternative to the existing disinfectants.
• Majority of the vaccines available or under development target the healthy population of age group 18 years and older. Multidisciplinary collaboration between material science, chemistry, and biomedical science plays an essential role in developing vaccines for different populations such as infants, children below the age of 5 years, and individuals with underlying medical conditions.
• The main target for current vaccines against COVID-19 is mostly based on the spike (S) glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2, which constantly develops mutations. Therefore, vaccine research and development should focus on different approaches to maintain its effectiveness.
• Mammals including dogs, cats, tigers, and lions were reported to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 after close contact with a human that is infected with COVID-19. Although there is no evidence that these infected mammals can spread SARS-CoV-2 and infect people, more studies in this area are required.
• Amphiphilic molecules such as soap were shown to be effective in breaking the lipid-bilayer membrane of SARS-CoV-2, causing its structure to fall apart. Therefore, identifying antiviral compounds that target the lipid-bilayer membrane of SARS-CoV-2 may be a viable therapeutic strategy.
• Since the long-term side effect of the existing vaccines is a major concern, it is necessary to develop an appropriate animal model to address this issue.

This review has provided an overview of all aspects of COVID-19, such as i. the structure of SARS-CoV-2, ii. molecular interaction between SARS-CoV-2 and ACE 2 receptor, iii. mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis, iv. transmission routes of SARS-CoV-2, v. persistence and viability of SARS-CoV-2 on different surfaces, vi. the materials and methods currently used for diagnosis, prevention, vaccines, and treatment for COVID-19, and vii. different approaches for the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of COVID-19 using nanotechnology. The chemistry perspective has helped to understand different aspects of COVID-19. A study using molecular dynamics simulations suggested that the high affinity between the S glycoprotein and ACE 2 may be due to the hydrophobic effect among the hydrophobic surface areas of S glycoprotein and ACE 2 at the binding site. In addition, another study also found that the enhanced affinity of SARS-CoV-2 toward ACE 2 is due to the increase in electrostatic interactions caused by mutations in the S glycoprotein. Furthermore, the study of the persistence and viability of SARS-CoV-2 on different surfaces showed that it has longer persistence and viability on materials such as plastics, glass, and stainless steel compared to copper, paper, and cardboard. Another research has also shown that the increase in temperature and relative humidity increases the decay rate of SARS-CoV-2. The mechanism of cleansing action of soaps involves two steps: i. destruction of the lipid-bilayer viral membrane by surfactant molecules, and ii. micelle formation. On the other hand, alcohols found in alcohol-based hand sanitizers, which are also amphiphilic compounds, inactivate SARS-CoV-2 by destabilizing and denaturing its protein structures. Lastly, using nanomaterials such as gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) and silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) has been found to be a potential alternative detection and preventive method, respectively. Hence, in conclusion, research collaborations between biology and chemistry with other disciplines such as material science, biomedical science, and nanotechnology play an important role in understanding all aspects of COVID-19 to develop an effective diagnosis, prevention, and treatments for this infectious disease caused by SARS-CoV-2.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the FIC block grant (UBD/RSCH/1.4/FICBF(b)/2022/046) received from Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei Darussalam.

Abbreviations

Author contributions.

M.M.K.: supervision, conceptualization, funding acquisition, and writing—review and editing. G. Y. W.: methodology, data curation, and writing—original draft preparation. N. A.: writing—review and editing, and conceptualization. M. M. S.: writing—review and editing, and conceptualization.

Declarations

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

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Attack and defense in the microverse: How small RNA molecules regulate viral infections of bacteria

by Ute Schönfelder, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena

Viruses need hosts. Whether it's measles, the flu or coronavirus, viral pathogens cannot multiply or infect other organisms without the assistance of their hosts' cellular infrastructure. However, humans are not the only ones affected by viruses: animals, plants and even microorganisms can all serve as hosts.

Viruses that use bacteria as host cells are called bacteriophages (or simply " phages " for short) and are thought to be the most abundant biological entities of all. Just as the human immune system springs into action to resist a flu or coronavirus infection, bacteria do not simply allow phages to infiltrate their cellular machinery without a fight.

A research team at the University of Jena and its Cluster of Excellence "Balance of the Microverse" has examined in detail the complex interaction of attack and defense strategies when cholera-causing bacteria (Vibrio cholerae) are infected with a bacteriophage known as VP882—and discovered that tiny RNA molecules play a decisive role. The researchers' findings have been published in the latest issue of the journal Cell Host & Microbe .

From harmless housemate to cunning kidnapper

There are two ways in which phages can multiply after infecting bacteria: either as invisible passengers, hidden in the bacteria's genetic material, or as cunning kidnappers, multiplying in vast numbers in bacterial cells without regard for potential losses and, ultimately, destroying the cells. Which method a phage adopts depends on whether sufficient numbers of other host cells are available in the immediate environment to provide shelter.

But how do phages determine this? "They rely on a chemical counting mechanism that bacteria use to identify other members of their species," explains Prof. Dr. Kai Papenfort of the University of Jena, who headed up the project.

Known as "quorum sensing," this method uses signal molecules that are produced by bacteria and released into their surroundings. At the same time, the bacteria monitor the concentration of these molecules using specific receptors, thereby gaining information about the size of their current population.

"The phages' trick essentially involves 'listening in' to this chemical communication between bacteria," says Papenfort.

In their experiments, the Jena researchers examined what happens to the phages and bacteria once the bacteria emit their quorum sensing signals. "We have observed that 99% of bacteria are destroyed within 60 minutes, in which time the phages take control," reports Dr. Marcel Sprenger, the lead author of the article.

The team discovered that this switchover is controlled by tiny RNA molecules, one of which is called "VpdS" (VP882 phage-derived sRNA). "As soon as the phages receive the chemical signal from the bacteria, this RNA is produced in high quantities," says Sprenger.

How bacteria fight back against viruses

In order to find out precisely which genes are regulated by VpdS, the team adopted a comprehensive, technological approach and infected bacteria cultures with both VP882 phages and genetically modified phages unable to produce VpdS.

Applying a method known as "RNA interaction by ligation and sequencing," the researchers were able to identify the interactions between all RNA molecules in the bacteria cultures at different times. "This not only gave us insights into which genes are active, it also showed how they interact," says Papenfort.

This method enabled the researchers to examine the genes of the phages as well as those of the host bacteria. As a result, the researchers gained extensive insights into the changes that occurred both during and after quorum sensing . "We were able to demonstrate that VpdS regulates phage genes as well as genes of the host, which effectively explains the destruction of bacterial cells," says Papenfort.

However, the researchers have been able to deduce further relationships from the data they collected. For example, bacteria also have genes that, when activated by a chemical signal, fight back against the phages' propagation and thereby counteract their own destruction.

According to Papenfort, this aspect is particularly interesting. "We can see these as the precursors to the immune systems in higher organisms. Bacteria have many genes that protect them against viruses." Given that these genes are also present in higher organisms, the researchers surmise that RNA molecules could also play an important role in their regulation.

Journal information: Cell Host & Microbe

Provided by Friedrich Schiller University of Jena

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Fact Check: Did Trump once tell Americans to inject bleach to fight COVID-19?

It’s time now for a fact-check of North Carolina politics. President Biden joined the vice president during a stop in Raleigh last week to promote his administration’s efforts to expand health care access. During his speech, the Biden made this claim about former President Trump’s response to the pandemic: “(Trump) told Americans all they had to do was inject bleach in themselves, remember that?” Biden said. “Not a joke, You think I am making this up? Just take a real shot of UV light.”

To fact-check that, I’m joined now by Paul Specht of WRAL.

Marshall Terry: OK, Paul. So the claim President Biden made refers to a press conference Trump gave in the early days of the pandemic. Which one was Biden talking about?

Paul Specht: The press conference was April 23, 2020, and this was six weeks after the World Health Organization officially declared the coronavirus outbreak as a global pandemic. Things are shutting down. People are looking to the White House for insights into what they could possibly do to prevent, or cut down on, the risk of getting infected. Trump's administration invited William Bryan to the White House and he was the under secretary for Science and Technology at the Department of Homeland Security. That's where these comments happened.

Terry: So Bryan spoke first and then Trump after that. What did they actually say?

Specht: Bryan said that his team had done some experiments that found that sun exposure and disinfectants, cleaning agents like bleach, could kill COVID-19 on surfaces and in the air. He eventually steps aside and says, you know, this concludes my research, we have some good stuff to go on.

Then, Trump takes the mic and sort of riffs. He's looking back and forth at reporters, and then Bryan, who's sitting off to the side. And Trump says, speaking to reporters, you know, a question that a lot of you are probably thinking is, what if we hit the body — this is his words — with a tremendous ultraviolet or very powerful light — and I'm sort of paraphrasing here for the sake of clarity.

And then he turns to Bryan and says, I think you said that hasn't been checked, but you're going to test it, which you can do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you're gonna test that. Sounds interesting, right?

And he goes on, he says, and I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in one minute. Is there a way we could do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you can see, it gets in the lungs — he's referring to the virus now — it does a tremendous number on the lungs, and I think it'd be interesting to check that. So he’s sort of rambling here and these comments created confusion.

Almost immediately after that, a reporter, who was sitting in this press briefing room asked him, did you just say you’re testing injections? And Bryan came back to the microphone and said no, no, that's not what we tested in our lab. And Trump also clarified, he said well, that's not what I meant, it wouldn't be through injections, it would be cleaning and sterilization of an area.

And so it appeared that they shut it down and clarified what they meant just moments later, but the press had already taken off with these comments that Trump made.

Terry: This whole conversation takes place in the larger context of Republicans being accused of minimizing the virus or turning to unscientific means to deal with it, right? It's not in a vacuum.

Specht: Right. And I don't remember the timing off the top of my head, but there were moments where some people appeared to downplay it and then offer alternative medicines. We saw that with hydroxychloroquine, a lot of Republicans speculated that that was a potential cure and studies showed that wasn't the case. We saw a lot of misinformation about what could and could not affect the coronavirus.

Terry: So how did you rate this claim by President Biden?

Specht: Mostly false. Trump did mention bringing UV rays and disinfectants into the body, but let's remember what Biden said. He said his predecessor, quote, "told Americans all they had to do was inject bleach in themselves, just take a shot of UV light." That is not what Trump said. It was by no means a demand, an instruction, a recommendation. Trump was speaking off the cuff. And then, scientists say, in an ill-advised way. He was not telling anyone to do anything. He was floating ideas for potential treatments to be tested. That's why we rated Biden's claim that Trump told people to inject bleach mostly false.

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Sensible Ways to Fight Terrorism

More from our inbox:, the quake, as felt in manhattan, r.f.k. jr.’s claim of ‘censorship’, obstacles to liberalism, prioritizing and valuing care jobs.

To the Editor:

Re “ The West Still Hasn’t Figured Out How to Beat ISIS ,” by Christopher P. Costa and Colin P. Clarke (Opinion guest essay, April 1):

Two clear lessons have emerged in the decade since ISIS exploded on the world scene. First, as the authors note, pulling all U.S. troops and intelligence assets from fragile conflict zones is a boon to globalized terror movements. Despite political promises, the full U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 and Afghanistan in 2021 did not “end” those wars; it transformed them into more complex and potentially more deadly challenges.

Second, we must reckon with the underlying grievances that make violent anti-Western ideologies, including militant jihadism, attractive to so many in the first place. These include the ill effects of globalization, and a “rules-based” world order increasingly insensitive to the needs of developing countries and regions.

Simply maintaining a military or intelligence presence in terror hot spots does nothing to reduce the sticky recruiting power of militant movements. Unless the United States and its allies and partners begin offering tangible policies that counter jihadi ideology and propaganda, we will just continue attacking the symptoms, not the causes.

Stuart Gottlieb New York The writer teaches American foreign policy and international security at Columbia University.

The Islamic State’s territorial caliphate in Iraq and Syria may have been eliminated years ago, but as Christopher P. Costa and Colin P. Clarke write, the terrorist group itself is very much in business. ISIS-K, its branch in Afghanistan, has conducted two large-scale external attacks over the last two months — one in Iran that killed more than 80 people and another near Moscow that took the lives of more than 130.

If the United States and its allies haven’t found a way to defeat ISIS-K in its entirety, it’s because terrorism itself is an enemy that can’t be defeated in the traditional sense of the term. This is why the war on terror framework, initiated under the George W. Bush administration immediately after the 9/11 attacks, was such poor terminology. Terrorism is going to be with us for as long as humanity exists.

Viewed this way, terrorism is a conflict management problem, not one that can be solved. While this may sound defeatist to many, it’s also the coldhearted truth. Assuming otherwise risks enacting policies, like invading whole countries (Iraq and Afghanistan), that are likely to create even more anti-U.S. terrorism than we started with.

Of course, all countries should remain vigilant. Terrorism will continue to be a part of the threat environment. The U.S. intelligence community must ensure that its counterterrorism infrastructure is well resourced and continues to focus on areas, like Afghanistan, where the U.S. no longer has a troop presence. But for the U.S., a big part of the solution is keeping our ambitions realistic and prioritizing among terrorist threats lest the system gets overloaded or pulled in too many directions at once.

While all terrorism is tragic, not all terrorist groups are created equal. Local and even regional groups with local objectives aren’t as important to the U.S. as groups that have transnational aims and the capabilities to strike U.S. targets. This, combined with keeping a cool head instead of trafficking in threat inflation, is key to a successful response.

Daniel R. DePetris New Rochelle, N.Y. The writer is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank in Washington.

Re “ Earthquake Rattles Northeast, but Little Damage Is Reported ” (live updates, nytimes.com, April 5):

I’m lying in bed Friday morning, on 14th Street in Manhattan. Suddenly I feel and see the bed start to shake!

My first thought — OMG, I’m in “The Exorcist.” Then an alert on my phone tells me that it’s an earthquake in New York City.

Frankly, I’m not sure which one scared me more.

Steven Doloff New York

Re “ Kennedy Calls Biden Bigger Threat to Democracy Than Trump ” (news article, April 3):

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s concern about the Biden administration’s “censorship” of misinformation might be viewed as legitimate if the American public demonstrated more responsibility about fact-checking what they see and hear on social media and other information platforms masquerading as legitimate sources of news.

Sadly, many in this country, and indeed the world, have abdicated responsibility for being factually informed about current events. As long as bad actors have unfettered access to social media platforms, it will be necessary to “censor” the misinformation they claim as fact. The world has become the proverbial crowded theater where one cannot yell “fire.”

Helen Ogden Pacific Grove, Calif.

Re “ The Great Struggle for Liberalism ,” by David Brooks (column, March 29):

In face of growing populism at home and abroad, Mr. Brooks issues a cri de coeur on behalf of liberal democracy and democratic capitalism, which provide the means to a “richer, fuller and more dynamic life.”

His impassioned plea for “we the people” of these United States to experience a sense of common purpose, to build a society in which culture is celebrated and families thrive, is made despite existential challenges to American liberalism:

1) We do not share an overarching belief in who we are as a people, as a nation.

2) Trust in our three branches of government, in checks and balances, is broken amid warring partisanship.

3) There is, for many, as Mr. Brooks notes, an “absence of meaning, belonging and recognition” that drives a tilt to authoritarianism in search of the restoration of “cultural, moral and civic stability” by any means necessary.

The ballot box in a free and open society allows for choice, and there are those who, in exercising their right to vote, would choose to cancel the aspirational hopes of the preamble to our Constitution.

David Brooks sees the full measure of the choices facing America and the world in 2024. Do we?

Michael Katz Washington

Re “ New Ways to Bring Wealth to Nations ,” by Patricia Cohen (news analysis, Business, April 4):

Ms. Cohen is right to argue that the service sector will be the key to economic growth in the future. However, it’s essential to consider what service jobs are — and who will be doing them.

Of course, the service industry includes office workers in tech hubs like Bengaluru, as highlighted by Ms. Cohen. Currently, these jobs are held predominantly by men, so to spur inclusive growth, employers and governments must make sure women have equal access.

But the service sector also includes hundreds of millions of people — mostly women — who are teachers and who care for children, older people and those with disabilities and illnesses. To seize the opportunity ahead, governments must position care jobs as careers of the future for women and men, alongside tech jobs. This requires making sure these positions provide good pay and working conditions.

If the goal is sustainable growth, the best approach leverages the critical care sector to generate income in the short run and prepare healthy, well-educated young people, which maintains progress in the long run.

Anita Zaidi Seattle The writer is president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Gender Equality Division.

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Don’t fight the COVID-19 vaccine mandate

A healthy workforce means a healthy company. That’s one of the underlying messages of last week’s executive order from President Biden pushing companies to get their employees vaccinated.

When President Joe Biden issued an executive order for a vaccine mandate for all federal workers and contractors—and a requirement that all businesses with 100 or more workers either mandate vaccines or regular testing for employees—I was all in favor of it. I’ve seen how quickly unvaccinated people can spread COVID-19.

Haywood County, N.C., the county next to my Buncombe County, just ran out of ICU beds. We’ve gone from six people dying in July to 51 dead in August . In fact, the western N.C. Mission Health Hospital Center , the region’s largest hospital system, has had to turn patients away. One COVID-19 patient died in the parking lot.

What’s this have to do with business? It’s simple, really: You can’t be a successful company if your workers (or customers) are getting sick or dying. And you’re going to have a hard time finding (or keeping) workers if they feel they’re in danger of getting COVID-19 on the job.

Not everyone is on board, of course. Even before President Biden made his announcement, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) tweeted, “Vaccine mandates are un-American. ” Former Vice President Mike Pence slammed President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates in a Fox News interview saying Biden’s announcement was “unlike anything I have ever heard from an American president.”

True, when George Washington ordered the Continental Army to be vaccinated against smallpox he wasn’t president yet. Washington did this, he wrote, because “We should have more to dread from it [smallpox], than from the Sword of the Enemy.”

Vaccines do help. According to the CDC’s latest numbers, the unvaccinated are over 10 times more likely to be hospitalized and 11 times more likely to die than those who are fully vaccinated . So as a business owner, what should you do?

I’ve been saying all along that you should insist on all your employees getting vaccinated . Not only is it legal in most cases, but it also just makes sense. Do you want your workers to get sick? Do you want them to spread the disease to customers? Do you want to never have your staffers physically get together again? I expect your answers, no matter your politics, would be no, no, and no.

You see, we’ve already been down this road before. In 1902, because of a smallpox outbreak, the Cambridge, Mass. health board ordered town residents to get vaccinated. One Henning Jacobson refused because he claimed it violated his constitutional rights.

Sound familiar?

Three years later, in 1905, the Supreme Court, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts , ruled he was wrong. As the Court wrote: “The liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint. There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good.”

I suspect President Biden and his advisors read the decision before issuing that executive order. His comment—“A distinct minority of Americans, supported by a distinct minority of elected officials, are keeping us from turning the corner”—could have come straight from that 1905 decision.

In other words, you can fight the mandate, but you’re not going to win in the courts.

You’re also not going to keep your employees. Personally, even though I work from home and have no intention of ever returning to an office, I would never work for anyone who’s anti-vaccine. It shows a contempt for reason, science, my health, and the corporate bottom line. I suspect you’ll find that many of your people agree.

In other words, “Just do it.” Just insist your crew gets the vaccine. It will be better for everyone that way.

Next read this:

• Biden boosts vaccine requirements for large employers, federal workers to combat COVID-19
• Most Americans now want vaccine mandates for planes, hotels, and restaurants, per Gallup
• Vaccine mandates pick up steam, but few employers say they’ll fire violators
• Washington inoculates an army

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You're never too old to start a business, onboarding remote employees doesn't have to be hard, the working-from-home debate gets old, the windows desktop is dying, from our editors straight to your inbox.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was the cutting-edge PC operating system, 300bps was a fast Internet connection, WordStar was the state-of-the-art word processor, and we liked it!

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Reporting by Christy Santhosh in Bengaluru and Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by Shailesh Kuber and Krishna Chandra Eluri

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