Research Article - Journal of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (2020) Volume 4, Issue 2

The Anatomy and Physiology of Social Distancing During COVID-19 Pandemic: a global perspective.

 Globally, public health has experienced the burden of endemic, epidemic and pandemic infectious diseases with varying extends.  Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus disease 2019 (SARs-CoV-2), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) are recent example that have challenged public health resources. Although the virulence of these pathogens vary considerably, in sum they have contributed to thousands of lives lost and overwhelmed the public health response capacity. The untimely outbreaks have also exposed waning community resilience (i.e. the ability to quickly recover and resume normal duties) at peak incidence periods. During these crises, public health planning, resource allocation, and international communication and reporting of infectious diseases cease to exist in adequate quantities to properly guard the public health. Most importantly, infectious diseases do not respect geographic borders. Covid-19 COVID-19 is a respiratory illness and is largely spread from one person to the other via droplets in the air. On February 11, 2019 the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the official name for the disease caused by a kind of coronavirus which first originated in Wuhan, China in late 2019, would be COVID-19. This a shortened version of coronavirus disease 2019.  This is not the formal name for the virus – the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses calls it the “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2”, or SARS-CoV-2, because it is related to the virus that caused the SARS outbreak in 2003. However, to avoid confusion with SARS the WHO calls it COVID-19 when communicating with the public. The virus that causes COVID-19 is known as SARS-CoV-2. The most commonly reported symptoms include a fever, dry cough and tiredness, and in mild cases people may get just a runny nose or a sore throat. In the most severe cases, people with the virus can develop difficulty breathing, and may ultimately experience organ failure. Recent insights have included additional symptoms to the lists namely loss of smell, stroke, and some patients reporting strange neurological issues that challenge our current understanding of the disease, and how to treat it. Some cases are fatal. Coronaviruses replicate their RNA genomes using enzymes called RNA-dependent RNA polymerases, which are prone to errors, but genomic analysis so far suggests that covid-19 is mutating slowly reducing the chance of it changing to become more deadly

Author(s): Patrick Mutunga Mwanza

Abstract PDF