NLIGHTENMENT COVID-19 SPECIAL REPORT
Apart but United Fighting the Coronavirus Pandemic by April Ingram
A
s we rang in 2020 — a new decade, full of optimism — few of us could have predicted the ways in which the world would change in just a couple months. Admittedly, I had never heard the term “social distancing” until a couple months ago. At the time of writing, there aren’t many countries left untouched by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this could also be a result of under-testing and under-reporting. And as of May 11, the number of cases in the United States surpassed that of all other nations... a tally that continues to change daily.
COVID-19: What We Need to Know Let’s get the terminology correct: The novel coronavirus, referred to as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), was previously known by the provisional name 2019-nCoV. The highly contagious virus is what causes the severe respiratory disease known as COVID-19. This is not our first global experience with a coronavirus — SARS and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) are also types of
coronaviruses. The current SARS-CoV-2 is an enveloped, single-stranded RNA virus — and although it appears to be not quite as fatal as the SARS or MERS coronaviruses, there have already been a significant number of global fatalities with more than 95,000 deaths worldwide at press time. Currently, the primary intervention is preventing the spread of COVID-19 by controlling infections. Public health authorities are carefully monitoring the situation to learn more about this novel virus and its associated outbreaks, so that we can better respond to the situation.
| May 2020
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