Today’s Topic Is About Duration of a Pandemic
When a contagious disease has the ability to affect most people in most areas, WHO will announce it as a pandemic. Whether it is still going on or stopped depends on its speed to spread and effects on people. If it cannot spread anymore, we can say it has been controlled. Overall, there are three ways to control the pandemic. The first is to do nothing and let people be exposed to the bacteria or virus as much as possible. Although the health system still tries its best to save patients, doctors will know little about the microbes in the limited time available. This would cause maybe millions of people to die and the rest who survive can have the antibody. When the percentage of people who are immune to the pandemic reaches a certain point, microbes will find it hard to get a host, and therefore the pandemic is stopped.
The second method is to slow the spread and save more time for specialists to devise vaccines. To slow down the spread, some measures need to be taken, like quarantine and keeping social distance. Also, in the first period, medical personnel need to find ways to test whether a person is a carrier. The place where pandemic first breaks out may need help from other regions in health care, and because other regions do not face great pressure as the break-out region, other regions can dispatch some of their medical personnel to lend a hand. Of course, the degree of keeping social distance corresponds to how severe the pandemic is in this specific region. If everything works out just fine, people can also get to work and have a normal life as before. After several months, when vaccines are brought out, governments can help people to get vaccines by grants. And like the circumstance before, microbes cannot find hosts when enough people are immune.
The third is to let all governments cooperate instantly and tightly. The main idea is to control the pandemic just in one or several locations after the breakout by cutting off transportation and strong quarantines. So this could stop the pandemic even in several weeks.
Just like every coin has two sides. The approaches mentioned above have pros and cons. The first is quicker than the second one to stop the pandemic but cannot handle microbes which vary quickly and frequently. The second method takes a longer period of time to control the pandemic, but all the time is worth it because vaccines can help people get perpetual immunity to a certain type of microbes and experts can devise different types of vaccines to cope with varied microbes. The third is quickest to control, but in reality, it is difficult to get all governments handled together. Besides, there are always unexpected ways to spread the pandemic, for example, the virus may vary and become capable of affecting both mice and people. The mice then move across borders, causing the disease to spread again.
During the coronavirus-19, most countries take the second measure. And now it is lucky that some health-care companies have devised vaccines which can effectively protect over 90% of testers. From all experience in this pandemic, we could do better in the next pandemics. Maybe we will succeed in making our offspring not even know the names of every pandemic they are facing in the future.
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