Question

Now that we know a bit more about epidemiologic curves and the important steps in an outbreak investigation, let's see how this is playing out with COVID-19.

1. You've probably heard public health officials say that we need to "flatten the curve". What does this statement mean and why is it so important?

2. Discuss one method public health officials have implemented to flatten the COVID-19 curve. Do you think this method is effective? Explain.

3. Will the nation-wide Black Lives Matter demonstrations and protests of police brutality and systemic racism have an impact incidence of COVID-19? Justify your answer.

4. Contact tracing is a critically important component of an outbreak investigation. Briefly explain what contract tracing is and why it is imperative with a disease like COVID-19.

5. For those of you that aren't aware, tech giants, Google and Apple, have designed COVID-19 tracking software and applications for your smartphone. Watch the following video summarizing the technology by the Wall Street Journal: COVID-19 Tracking Software.  By utilizing location services and Bluetooth on your smartphone, these devices are theoretically be able to notify individuals of potential exposure to SARS-CoV-2. Answer questions A-D below:

1. Do you think making use of such technology is a viable means for accomplishing contact tracing?
2. Outline one positive aspect of this type of technology.
3. Outline one negative aspect of this type of technology.
4. Do you think this is a violation of privacy? Like "big brother" is watching your every move? Justify your answer.

Answer 1

Preventive measures to lessen the odds of disease incorporate remaining at home, staying away from swarmed places, keeping good ways from others, washing hands with cleanser and water regularly and for in any event 20 seconds, rehearsing great respiratory cleanliness, and abstaining from contacting the eyes, nose, or mouth with unwashed hands.The U.S. Communities for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests covering the mouth and nose with a tissue when hacking or sniffling and suggests utilizing within the elbow if no tissue is available. Proper hand cleanliness after any hack or wheeze is encouraged. The CDC has suggested material face covers in open settings where other social separating measures are hard to keep up, to some degree to restrain transmission by asymptomatic individuals. The U.S. National Institutes of Health rules don't suggest any drug for anticipation of COVID‑19, previously or after introduction to the SARS-CoV-2 infection, outside the setting of a clinical trial.

Social separating procedures intend to diminish contact of tainted people with huge gatherings by shutting schools and working environments, limiting travel, and dropping enormous open gatherings.[127] Distancing rules additionally incorporate that individuals remain in any event 6 feet (1.8 m) apart.[128] There is no medicine known to be successful at forestalling COVID‑19.[129] After the usage of social removing and stay-at-home requests, numerous locales have had the option to support a viable transmission rate ("Rt") of short of what one, which means the sickness is going away in those areas.

As a COVID-19 immunization isn't normal until 2021 at the earliest, a key piece of overseeing COVID‑19 is attempting to diminish and postpone the pestilence top, known as "leveling the curve". This is finished by easing back the contamination rate to diminish the danger of wellbeing administrations being overpowered, taking into consideration better treatment of current cases, and deferring extra cases until successful medicines or an antibody become available.

A few nations have suggested that sound people wear face covers or material face covers (like scarves or handkerchiefs) in any event in certain open settings, including China, Hong Kong, Spain, Italy,Russia, and the United States. This proposal is intended to diminish the spread of the sickness by asymptomatic and pre-symtomatic people and is a correlative measure to set up preventive estimates, for example, social distancing. Face covers limit the discharge of respiratory beads by contaminated people while breathing, talking and coughing.[26] Non-clinical fabric face covers, for example, a scarf or a handkerchief are suggested for the overall population in places where social separating is hard to maintain. Medical evaluation facemasks, for example, N95 covers ought to be held and organized for medicinal services laborers and first responders.

Those determined to have COVID‑19 or who accept they might be contaminated are exhorted by the CDC to remain at home but to get clinical consideration, call ahead before visiting a medicinal services supplier, wear a face veil before entering the human services supplier's office and when in any room or vehicle with someone else, spread hacks and wheezes with a tissue, normally wash hands with cleanser and water and abstain from sharing individual family unit items. The CDC additionally suggests that people wash hands frequently with cleanser and water for in any event 20 seconds, particularly in the wake of heading off to the can or when hands are obviously messy, before eating and in the wake of cleaning out one's nose, hacking or sniffling. It further suggests utilizing a liquor based hand sanitiser with in any event 60% liquor, however just when cleanser and water are not promptly available.

For territories where business hand sanitisers are not promptly accessible, the WHO gives two details to neighborhood creation. In these definitions, the antimicrobial movement emerges from ethanol or isopropanol. Hydrogen peroxide is utilized to help take out bacterial spores in the liquor; it is "not a functioning substance for hand antisepsis". Glycerol is included as a humectant.

Logically more grounded relief endeavors to decrease the quantity of dynamic cases at some random time—"smoothing the bend"— permits social insurance administrations to more readily deal with a similar volume of patients.Likewise, dynamically more noteworthy increments in human services limit—called raising the line, for example, by expanding bed check, staff, and gear, assists with satisfying expanded need.

2 ) For some, nations gazing intently at quick rising coronavirus case checks, the race is on to "straighten the bend."

The United States and different nations, specialists state, are probably going to be hit by torrents of Covid-19 cases in the coming a long time without forceful general wellbeing reactions. In any case, by making certain strides — dropping huge open get-togethers, for example, and urging a few people to limit their contact with others — governments have a shot at getting rid of new chains of transmission, while additionally attempting to relieve the harm of the spread that isn't leveled out.

The scourge bend, a measurable outline used to picture when and at what speed new cases are accounted for, could be smoothed, instead of being permitted to rise exponentially.

The thought that the bend of this episode could be leveled started to pick up confidence after China made the unprecedented stride of securing a huge number of individuals days ahead of time of the Lunar New Year, to keep the infection from spreading around the nation from Wuhan, the city where the flare-up seems to have begun. Numerous specialists at the time said it would have been difficult to slow a quickly transmitting respiratory contamination by successfully closing down huge urban communities — and potentially counterproductive.

Yet, the isolates, remarkable in current occasions, seem to have kept dangerous flare-ups from happening in urban areas outside of Hubei region, where Wuhan is found.

From that point forward, spread of the infection in China has eased back to a stream; the nation detailed just 19 cases on Monday. Furthermore, South Korea, which has had the third biggest episode outside of China, likewise has all the earmarks of being beating back transmission through forceful activities. In any case, different spots, strikingly Italy and Iran, are battling.

For a considerable length of time, a discussion has seethed about whether the infection could be "contained" — a methodology the WHO has been admonishing nations to concentrate on — or whether it appeared well and good to just attempt to diminish the infection's blow, a methodology known as "alleviation.

3. No, the nation-wide Black Lives Matter demonstrations and protests of police brutality and systemic racism have an impact incidence of COVID-19 because it is a virus, which is spread through droplets.

4. Coronavirus ailment 2019 (COVID-19) is brought about by the SARS-CoV-2 infection, and spreads from individual to-individual through bead also, contact transmission. To control the spread of COVID-19, intercessions need to break the chains of human-to-human transmission, guaranteeing that the quantity of new cases created by each affirmed case is kept up beneath 1 (compelling generation number < 1). As a feature of a complete system, case distinguishing proof, segregation, testing and care, and contact following and isolate, are basic exercises to decrease transmission and control the pandemic.

Contact following is the way toward distinguishing, evaluating, and overseeing individuals who have been presented to a sickness to forestall ahead transmission. When deliberately applied, contact following will break the chains of transmission of an irresistible illness and is consequently a fundamental general wellbeing device for controlling irresistible sickness flare-ups. Contact following for COVID-19 requires distinguishing people who may have been presented to COVID-19 and tailing them up every day for 14 days from the last purpose of presentation.

This record gives direction on the most proficient method to build up contact following limit with regards to the control of COVID-19. It expands upon WHO contemplations in the examination of cases and bunches of COVID-19.

Basic components of the usage of contact following are network commitment and open help; cautious arranging and thought of nearby settings, networks, and societies; a workforce of prepared contact tracers and chiefs; coordinations support to contact following groups; and a framework to order, incorporate, and examine information continuously.

For contact following to be powerful, nations must have sufficient ability to test speculate cases in a convenient way. Where this isn't conceivable, testing and contact following systems may rather concentrate on explicit high-chance settings with helpless people, for example, emergency clinics, care homes, or other shut settings (for example quarters).

Since people may transmit COVID-19 while pre-suggestive or asymptomatic, this direction additionally underlines the significance of isolating contacts to additionally lessen the potential for optional transmission.