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If you’ve been assuming that the coronavirus would simply blow over, or that it wouldn’t have a major effect on you, then you’re in for a rude awakening. According to a White House briefing by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Americans’ lives are going to be changing a lot thanks to the virus.
Dr. Fauci issued a warning to the US during a White House briefing, stating that people would need to change the way they live and operate to accommodate the virus. “We would like the country to realize that as a nation, we can’t be doing the kinds of things we were doing a few months ago. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a state that has no cases or one case,” Dr. Fauci stated. He referred people to the federal coronavirus.gov website for more information on what precautions they can take.
“If and when the infections will come — and they will come, sorry to say, sad to say — when you’re dealing with an infectious disease… we want to be where the infection is going to be, as well as where it is,” Dr. Fauci continued. “Everybody should say, ‘All hands on deck.'”
Every second counts when dealing with a serious outbreak of a novel virus. In 1918, a few weeks of delayed response to the “Spanish flu” due to governments not wanting to hurt morale during World War I led to between 50 and 100 million people dying. That virus, H1N1, is a variant of the flu, a disease we’ve gotten much better at containing over the years.
The COVID-19 virus, on the other hand, doesn’t react to simple flu symptom relief. We’ve never encountered it before, and its closest cousin, SARS, was contained much more easily than COVID-19. Since the virus is so new, it’s hard for experts to say what the long-term dangers of the disease are. Will it fade with warmer weather, or is it here to stay? Will it continue to have a case mortality rate of 3.4 percent, or will it become deadlier with time?
Among the most concerning features of the virus are how little we know about it. It could become a seasonal epidemic, breaking out every year when the temperature falls. It could become an endemic, a disease always lurking in some portion of the population, ready to become a full-fledged epidemic again. For these reasons, it’s important for people to be prepared.
