Preventing the Spread: The COVID-19 Pandemic

By: C. Paixão

As stated in the Oxford Dictionary, “a pandemic is an epidemic of an infectious disease that spread across a large region, for instance, multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a large community and many nations.” Hence to manage a pandemic, worldwide collaboration and agreements are needed for the neutralization of the disease. An example of when this happened was only recently, starting in 2019 and still a present issue, in 2022.  

Recently, a pandemic spread worldwide and affected the entire planet, killing over 6.32 million people in the world. This pandemic, called COVID-19, originated in Wuhan, China, and the disease was first transmitted to a human by eating a pangolin, the most trafficked mammal in the world, who was infected by the disease and had contracted it by a bat. 

To contain this global outbreak, all countries worldwide established many rules and guidelines. At first, the lockdown was instated, where people couldn’t leave their homes unless it was urgent, for example going to the supermarket or the hospital. Later on, the use of facemasks was mandatory to prevent more spread of the disease. Other guidelines were recommended to the people and established in countries, such as maintaining a safe distance of 1 metre from others, choosing open and ventilated areas rather than closed ones, cleaning hands often and sterilizing products and objects, staying home if one feels unwell, not sharing food or drinks to prevent contamination, taking COVID tests to discover if one is infected with the disease, and other methods to manage the pandemic.

​Recently, in 2021, scientists, professionals, laboratories and research centres started to develop treatments for the COVID-19. Treatments, such as vaccinations, have been distributed all around the world, where currently, 4 doses of vaccines are available for the world’s population to protect themselves from the disease and its many variants.