By Susan Braider
COVID-19 is a coronavirus. That is, when studied under a microscope it is seen to be surrounded by a crown. Since COVID-19 and the common cold virus are coronaviruses, a common mistake is made in considering that they have similar functions. Comparatively speaking, COVID-19 is a far more contagious and potentially lethal virus than is the common cold.
This same error is made when COVID-19 and the seasonal flu are compared. The flu molecule is not a coronavirus. What leads to the false comparison is the seemingly high incidence of flu each year. Because 1% of the people who develop flu require hospitalization, and about 5% of those who require hospitalization die from the flu or a flu-related complaint, the assumption is that more people die from flu each year than die from COVID-19. Yet, 20% of all victims of COVID-19 need to be hospitalized and at least 5% of those who are hospitalized die from the disease. COVID -19 belongs to a large group of viruses that vary in the severity of the illness they cause as well as in the species they infect. The mechanism by which these infections have their effects is that they trigger inflammatory processes. Inflammation can become so robust that the system crashes, as occurs when an individual develops acute respiratory distress syndrome. Some of you may remember the SARS scare that occurred in 2002-3.
Your phone may ring as mine did at 11 pm on a Friday night. The identity of the caller was unknown to me, but it was from a small town where I once lived. Concluding, that it was unlikely to be a nuisance call, I answered it. I was asked to confirm my name and my date of birth. The speaker informed me that he was the doctor that I saw earlier that week. He was calling to inform me that I was exposed to COVID-19 while at Bassett Hospital. No mention was made of who was the contact, or index case to protect his privacy. What was important was someone was informing me that I was exposed to this potentially deadly virus. I was being alerted to the fact that I had to be vigilant about the changes in my health status foe 10to 14 days lest I develop the condition. Also, having been warned, if I am a responsible person, I will conduct myself in a way that prevents everyone around me from developing the infection. I would be receiving a daily phone call and would be asked to report on the development of any symptoms and appearance of a temperature.
Quarantine, Isolation, and Social Distancing
Isolation is the separation of people who are sick with an infectious disease from those who are not sick. Quarantine an individual with contagious disease to see if they become sick. Social distancing is the effort to maintain a distance of at least 6 feet from other people to reduce the risk of transmitting and contracting the virus.
The purpose of the call was to inform me of the and to tell me how I should manage this period when I did not, indeed, could not know if I was infected.
To determine if I contracted the virus the physician informed me to take my temperature morning and evening for the duration of my confinement. Absent a test for COVID-19, quarantine and social distancing when I had to go out were the best options available. One of the challenges arising from the pandemic is that individuals with the disease can be asymptomatic and infectious at the same time. Also, those who are pre-symptomatic may also be infectious.
COVID-19 can range from asymptomatic to mild and from mild to moderate and from moderate to severe cases which require hospitalization. The 20% of COVID- cases that are severe About 80% of those who contract COVID-19 develop mild home-based medical care at the extreme. Twenty percent of those infected with COVID-19 requiring hospitalization. Not only do a greater proportion of COVID-19 patients suffer from a severe form of the disease needing hospitalization, but they are hospitalized are likely to be 11-12 days instead on the 5-6 days required by flu patients.
The purpose of quarantining me was to prevent me from infecting people with whom U y isolating me, the public health community was breaking the route of disease transition. If I was going to develop COVID-19, I would do so over the 14 days between my first encounter and the end of the virus’ period of being infectious.
We began to be bombarded by news of the effects COVID-19 is having on states, counties, cities, towns, offices, homes, and individuals just 6 months ago. This virus did not exist a year ago, so any process to develop a vaccine to protect us from COVID-19 became the focus of researchers in early 2020 at the earliest.
Despite its reluctance to share information, the Chinese shared the genetic sequence of COVID-2 that they extracted from the serum of a patient in Wuhan, at the end of December, 2019. Two days later, on January 14th doctors reported that they were perplexed by a cluster of 41 pneumonia patients because the disease was of an unknown etiology. Of those patients, 11 were severely ill. No fatalities were reported.
International politics, secrecy, and hidden agendas confound and confuse the efforts of the public health officials appointed to educate the America public of the latest news about the pandemic, the growing knowledge of the effects of the disease, and its impacts on society. Public health officials are champions of population health. Their goal is to establish conditions where everyone has the opportunity to enjoy good health. Few understand that social justice is and has always been the driver of public health. It is the misfortune of the American people that the President is unteachable. That the public health community is sharing what it is discovering in a timely fashion.
The mode of transmission of the infection remained unclear. They suspected person-to-person transmission was involved because family members were in the cluster. Two days later, they informed the public that there were 41 one confirmed cases. The Chinese proposed that transmission could result from person to person contact because members of the same family were among the hospitalized.
When a contact tracer is informed that an individual, identified as the contact, tested positive for CORVID-19 or developed symptoms of CORVID-19, he will telephone the contact, identify himself as a public health official, assure the contact that his confidentiality will be protected, and then engage in the process of tracing all the people with whom the contact may have been in contact during the infectious stage of the natural history of CORVID-19.
The infectious stage of CORVID-19 With the assistance of the tracer, a timeline will be established to determine what the individual was doing and with whom he came in contact during the 2 days before he developed symptoms or, if asymptomatic, during the 2 days preceding diagnosis with the positive test. Once the timeline is established, the contact tracer will ask the infected individual for the contact information for every individual The purpose of contact tracing is to stop the spread of the virus.
