COVID-19 coronavirus: overview and impact

COVID-19 Coronavirus

Abstract

First appearing in China in late 2019, the novel Coronavirus COVID-19 has become the most significant global pandemic event in a century.  As of October 28, 2020 the total number of cases worldwide was 44 million with 1.17 million deaths.  The United States has had an extremely politicized response to the virus, and despite having less than five percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has had more than 20 percent of the world’s COVID-19 cases with 8.85 million cases and 227 thousand deaths.  Currently, it seems unlikely that COVID-19 will be under control and people able to resume their normal lives until late 2021.  In this essay, we discuss what Coronavirus is, what COVID-19 is, where it originated, the health impact of the disease, risk factors, efforts to contain the spread of the disease, the economic impact of the disease, and how COVID-19 may be impacting the 2020 United States Presidential election.

COVID-19 Coronavirus Essay Titles

Global Pandemic or Global Panic?  The Facts About the Coronavirus

Mask Not What You Can Do for Your Country

Preventing Coronavirus Is Easy, Treating It Can Be Hard

Mask Mandates: Constitutional Violation or Appropriate Government Intervention? 

How Government Leaders Have Responded to the Coronavirus Pandemic

COVID-19 Coronavirus Essay Topics

Are mask mandates to prevent the spread of the coronavirus constitutional?  Many people suggest that mask mandates are a violation of their constitutional rights. Has the Supreme Court previously considered the question in other pandemics or addressed similar questions in other contexts?  What have the results been?  Would those results support a claim that mask mandates are constitutional? 

Is Coronavirus really as deadly as they say it is?  With variations in fatality rates depending on the country and pre-existing conditions, is the Coronavirus as dangerous as people initially thought it was? 

How President Trump’s successful treatment for COVID-19 highlights the interrelationship between wealth, access to healthcare, and treatment outcomes for people infected with the Coronavirus. 

Current best practices to prevent the spread of COVID-19 as people head into cold and flu season. Discuss the steps people should take to prevent transmission of the virus, whether any early steps have proven unhelpful, and whether people need to get their Flu shots since people are already taking precautions to prevent COVID-19 transmission. 

Is COVID-19 likely to be only the first global pandemic of the coming century?  Many prominent people have been predicting a pandemic event for several years; is COVID-19 an indicator of things to come, or a once-in-a-century type event? 

COVID-19 Coronavirus Essay Outline

I. Introduction

A. Define COVID-19

B. Where COVID-19 originated

C. Health Impact of COVID-19

D. Risk Factors

E. Efforts to Contain the Spread 

F. Economic Impact of COVID-19

G. COVID-19 and the 2020 Presidential Election

H. Thesis: Although it is easy to see the immediate real-life impact of COVID-19 on global health, welfare, and economy, it is more difficult to predict the lasting effects of the pandemic, which could continue to impact people for the next several decades.  

II. Define COVID-19

A. Coronavirus

B. Novel

C. 19

III. Origination

A.   Wuhan wet-market

B.   European strain 

C.   Other theories

IV. Health Impact of COVID-19

A. Symptoms 

B. Prognosis

C. Mortality

V.  Risk Factors

A. Health

B. Demographics

C. Wealth

VI. Economic Impact of COVID-19

A. US

B. Global 

C. Projections

VII. COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

A. Americans upset with Trump’s response to coronavirus. 

B. Some Americans upset with more restrictive measures.

C. Trump does not support restrictive measures.

D. Biden supports restrictive measures. 

VIII. New Coronavirus Wave in U.S. 

IX. Conclusion 

Essay Title: The Coronavirus Is Real and It Kills Economies as Well as People

Hook Sentence: Almost a year ago, COVID-19, a novel coronavirus, first emerged as a major health epidemic in China; now, it has spread around the globe, not only killing people but also bringing economies to a halt.    

Introduction

While most people are aware that there is a global COVID-19 pandemic currently impacting people, there has been a sufficient amount of intentional and unintentional misinformation about this strain of the coronavirus that many people do not understand the extent of the problem.  The COVID-19 pandemic is the most significant epidemic or pandemic event to hit the world since the Spanish Flu in the 1918 and 1919.  By the end of that pandemic, between three and five percent of the world’s population had died as a result of a particularly virulent strain of influenza (Roos, 2020).  It also led to a massive economic struggle for people around the globe, including thrusting the United States into a two-year depression.  This pandemic event shares many similarities, but also some significant differences with the Spanish Flu including.  Ways that it is similar include the health impacts of the disease, some of the risk factors, and containment efforts.  Ways that it is different include overall mortality rates, the economic impact of the disease, and how COVID-19 influences politics.  

Thesis Statement

Although a smaller percentage of people around the globe are likely to die from COVID-19 than died from the Spanish flu, it is likely that COVID-19 will have a more dramatic and long-lasting economy on global politics, economy, and long-term health than the Spanish Flu pandemic. 

Body 

The coronavirus known as COVID-19 is one of many coronaviruses.  It is often called a novel virus because it was first identified in humans in 2019.  The term coronavirus refers to zoonotic viruses that cause illnesses in animals and can be transmitted from animals to humans.  There are several types of coronaviruses, but most of them cause mild illnesses in people.  However, there have been some other significant coronaviruses that have caused local epidemics and had pandemic potential, such as the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV).  Although the term refers to a range of illnesses, they generally seem to target the respiratory system and produce symptoms that range from mild to pneumonia and death.  

COVID-19 has a more dramatic impact on many people’s health than prior coronavirus infections.  It also has a wider range of impact.  In some people, it can be asymptomatic.  In others it can cause respiratory and gastrointestinal problems.  For those most severely impacted by the disease, it can impair breathing and cause organ failure, resulting in death.  COVID-19 is believed to have originated in Wuhan-China and that the initial point of animal-to-human transmission occurred in a market selling both live and dead animals for human consumption.  The genetics of the virus suggests that it originally began in a bat, but it may have passed through other types of animals before landing in humans.  The disease appears to have the ability to evolve rapidly, with different strands impacting different areas of the globe.  The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 to be a global pandemic on March 11, 2020 (Cucinotta & Vanelli, 2020).  

The health impact of COVID-19 depends on a number of factors.  For many people, the symptoms of COVID-19 may, indeed, by similar to a regular seasonal flu.  In fact, many people have the disease and are asymptomatic.  This had led to dangerous statements that COVID-19 is no more dangerous than the flu, which is not true for a number of reasons.  First, for those who experience significant symptoms, COVID-19 does appear to be deadlier and more health-threatening than the recent strains of the flu.  Second, modern medicine does a great job of handling the flu, through vaccines that help stop the disease’s spread and limit symptoms in people who do get sick to retrovirals that treat the disease.  While better COVID-19 treatments are being developed, when the pandemic initially occurred, doctors were scrambling to come up with effective interventions.  These changes can be seen by looking at mortality rates, which have dropped significantly since the disease emerged, and which are lower in countries where patients have access to good medical care.  This is one reasons that it has been so important to flatten the curve of the coronavirus spread; many of the early COVID-19 deaths occurred because there were not enough hospital beds or medical professionals to care for the ill and dying.   

Of course, one of the real problems with trying to determine mortality rates from COVID-19 is people have certainly missed some of the COVID-19 deaths.  This is an expected result anytime a new disease appears on the scene; as early deaths are unlikely to be attributed to the disease.  In fact, it is such a well-established phenomenon that researchers are always aware that these numbers may be underreported.  That is why “in times of upheaval- wars, natural disasters, outbreaks of disease- researchers need to tally deaths rapidly, and usually turn to a blunt but reliable metric: excess mortality.  It’s a comparison of expected deaths with ones that actually happened, and, to many scientists, it’s the most robust way to gauge the impact of the pandemic” (Viglione, 2020).  In many of the countries currently being impacted by COVID-19, the number of excessive deaths is higher than the number of deaths currently being attributed to COVID-19, suggesting that COVID-19 deaths may be being underreported.  Therefore, any evidence about the mortality rates of COVID-19 must be taken with a grain of salt. 

What is known is that for those who are most vulnerable, COVID-19 remains a very dangerous disease.  The elderly are an identified high-risk group, even if they are in otherwise good health.  People with pre-existing conditions are also at higher risk, and this includes active pre-existing conditions like high blood pressure and passive pre-existing conditions like obesity.  In addition, both individual living scenarios and environmental demographics can impact disease susceptibility (CDC, 2020).  People who live in close communities where the spread of disease is easier, who lack access to medical care, or who experience communication challenges are all at higher risk.  In the United States, this has meant that ethnic and racial minorities are at a greater risk than white Americans in most communities.  

While COVID-19 can have a deadly impact on even previously very healthy individuals, it is clear that it targets those with pre-existing conditions or in vulnerable populations.  The safest way to protect them is to reduce the spread of the disease in the community.  Many people believe that herd immunity is the answer to this problem.  However, this is based on a misunderstanding of the concept of herd immunity. Herd immunity refers to the idea that a large enough percentage of the group is immune to the disease, offering protection to other members of the group (APIC, 2020).  However, to achieve herd immunity in a scenario without vaccines, several factors need to occur.  First, there must be significant spread of disease, which means that weak and vulnerable members of the herd will be infected and die.  Second, the disease needs to create immunity that prevents reinfection and there is no reason to believe, at this time, that COVID-19 cannot evolve quickly enough to re-infect people in a timeframe that prevents true herd immunity.  Without a vaccine, the reality is that even if society achieves herd immunity, it will be at a tremendous cost to human lives and health.  

Fortunately, there are several things people can do to help stop or slow community spread of COVID-19.  One of the most effective measures to slow the transmission of the disease is to wear a mask or other face covering, securely covering the mouth and nose, whenever a person is outside of their home and either inside a building or within six feet of a person outside of their bubble.  In addition, maintaining a physical distance of at least six feet from other people helps reduce disease spread. Washing hands thoroughly and using hand sanitizers when hand washing is not possible helps prevent contact spread of the disease.  As flu season approaches, flu vaccines will play an important role in slowing the spread of coronavirus, because flu symptoms like coughing and sneezing can spread coronavirus as well as the flu (DeMarco, 2020).  

Unfortunately, some of the important steps to slow the spread of the disease have had a dramatic impact on the economy.  Closing down businesses or limiting capacity have caused businesses, especially small businesses, to shut down around the world.  While countries with more robust social welfare programs may not have seen the same extent of impact, no countries that have had active pandemic infections have been spared economic consequences.  In addition, because the economy is global, even those countries that have been successful at reducing the impact of COVID-19 on their population have experienced economic problems.  COVID-19 is currently causing recession conditions in many countries, and, if it follows the same pattern as the Spanish Flu, it will lead to at least short periods of economic depression in most countries, worldwide.