COVID-19 - An Essay
Today starts my COVID-19 essay project. There is so much information out there that I want to condense it down to a long-form post and offer my opinion on all. As I want to publish this later on my Medium account, I will start with a brief introduction and gather my notes below. Comments are heavily welcome but keep in mind this article will stay as a work in progress for quite some time.
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COVID-19
Corona is everywhere in the news. Newspapers, TV shows, blog articles. Everybody is talking and writing about it, it’s my turn now to put even more words out there. The following article is based on my personal experience and information I received. Facts might be false by now or aren’t correct in any way. All statements without guarantee.
Let’s start with a brief introduction of myself. My name is Philipp, I’m a 24-year-old Web developer from Austria. In my free time, I work as a volunteer paramedic at the Austrian Red Cross. Besides my paramedic training, I don’t have any medical experience and I apologize in advance for stuff I’m probably going to mess up.
Virus
Many things can lead to sick or injured humans. Accidents, bacteria, and Viruses to mention the largest three groups. One of the latter the so-called “Corona Virus” is putting huge pressure on worldwide health systems.
Let’s dig a little deeper into the start of this epidemic and pandemic disease. I’ll start with referring to the first published “Situation Report” by the WHO. According to it the WHO was informed about patients with pneumonia that was based on an unknown cause on December the 31. Through January the 3rd a sum of 44 patients evolved on this then-unknown cause.
Finally, on January the 7th, a new genome along the Coronavirus family was identified. Yes, there are more of them. The genetic sequence was quickly shared by 12th January so international research could begin.
By the 20th of January, there were a total of 282 patients. The virus was already spreading as cases started to evolve in other countries.
TODO graphic of patient count worldwide (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1\_qpkj\_oEHABRu20ETeOCkx9fAuaQrG0CPEPgUYAnE\_M/edit?usp=sharing)
It wasn’t long until the first patients showed up in the US (2020-01-24) and the European Union (2020-01-25). At that time I think nobody was expecting such a fast spread across such a large area. Depending on how you define “globally”, it was already spreading out everywhere and new cases popped up everywhere.
TODO research some stuff on the history
TODO outbreak in Europe
TODO outbreak in Austria
TODO failure of the European Union
TODO impact on Austria and the European Union
TODO https://outbreak.cc/
TODO https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
TODO https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports