An epidemic is a disease that affects a large number of people within a community, population or region, pandemic is an epidemic that has spread over multiple countries or continents. The COVID -19 pandemic, is an ongoing pandemic of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the severe respiratory distress syndrome coronavirus2 (SARS2-CoV-2); first identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. As of January 9th 2021 there has been, world wide, 89,335,920 reported cases of COVID-!9: 1,922,052 deaths, and 64,008,021 recovered. There is evidence, that long term effects of the virus continue to be felt, irrespective of the severity of the initial symptoms.
The bubonic plague, or the “Black Death” was the deadliest pandemic lasting between 1346 to 1353 and responsible for between 75 – 200 million (est.) deaths. Granted healthcare was pretty poor in those times so this, without doubt, contributed to high death rates.
The “Spanish Flu” (1918-1920) resulted in an estimated 500 million people fallen victim to the disease with roughly 1 million people dying.
Asian Flu (1957-1958), yet another showing for influenza claimed approximately 1 million lives.
The H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic of 2009-2010, reported by the Centers for Disease Control and prevention, “affected as many as 1.4 billion people across the globe and killed between 151,700 and 575,400 people”, in one year.
Despite improvements in healthcare, infection rates tend to be high due to the ease through which viruses are transmitted, particularly the influenza viruses. In the United Kingdom, the impact on healthcare services has been dramatic because of a previous change in how healthcare is delivered. Due to the move away from curative healthcare to more preventative healthcare, delivered and managed in the community, between 1987/88 and 2018/2019 there has been almost a 50% reduction in hospital beds. However, with an ageing, growing population there is a clear need to increase bed capacity, exacerbated by the pandemic.
When the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was prevalent in the 1980’s, best practice in healthcare was to assume that everybody had the virus. This approach had several advantages, for example it prevented discrimination against those with the virus against those who did not: it also introduced the practice of universal precautions. By treating everybody the same, using precautions in the work place became a norm; therefore, one was less likely to make any mistakes when protecting ones self when providing care, an approach I take today. Maintaining a personal space of a couple of metres, wearing a facemask when indoors, particularly in work and out shopping: washing hands regularly, and not mixing, being just a few universal precautions I take (with no hardship).