During this corona-virus đˇ pandemic if you think isolation from the rest of the world is a solution, then probably you are thinking of going back to the Stone Age.
Do you think it’s a good idea? đ¤
Well, possibly.
However, evidence says – in the time of Middle Ages when there were no airplanes or trains, Black Death epidemics spread over the continents.
Considering this, I think it is a high time to think about the Participatory Epidemiology.
Participatory Epidemiology involves a disease surveillance system that collects data for public health action by directly involving the population at risk in submitting relevant data through a variety of survey tools. This can happen in many forms, from sophisticated mobile phone apps to simple hotlines.
To make it happen we need to have closer global and local cooperation so countries can share information more efficiently.
This is how it becomes everyone’s job. If everyone collaborates then we will be able to detect a health issue and take initiatives long before it goes beyond our control.
Reference:
Smolinski, M. S., Crawley, A. W., Olsen, J. M., Jayaraman, T., & Libel, M. (2017). Participatory Disease Surveillance: Engaging Communities Directly in Reporting, Monitoring, and Responding to Health Threats. JMIR public health and surveillance, 3(4), e62. https://doi.org/10.2196/publichealth.7540
Harari, Yuval N., (2020, March 5). Coronavirus: Countries need to ‘help each other’ as deaths increase – BBC Newsnight [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNxAmRAYagQ
At the media briefing on COVID-19 (Coronavirus) on 28 February 2020, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) discussed the current situation of the coronavirus outbreak. He said â
âOur greatest enemy right now is not the virus itself. Itâs fear, rumours and stigma.â
The chair of the Global Health Council, Dr. Jonathan D. Quick, also agrees â fear is one of the major hindrances towards the management of any global pandemic.
In the book titled âThe End of Epidemicsâ he wrote, small infectious-disease outbreaks explode into global pandemics through human action or inaction. We human beings are too often victims of our own psychological, political, and sociological failures.
Since the earliest times, fear is one of the human failings that have stopped or delayed effective prevention and response.
We are all afraid of death. We respond to the fear of epidemic disease by wanting to blame someone else. Anytime a threat arises, we want to blame the âother,â those not like âus.â At the outbreak of the 1918 Spanish flu, Americans blamed âthe Hun.â AIDS was blamed on gay men. We want to punish those with the disease, pretending that whatever makes them other has cursed them. The most contagious behavioural reaction that affects political leaders, businesspeople, and the public is panic that disproportionately exceeds the actual event. Scared people over personalize the news, and their worries increase. Fear is a warning system intended to alert us to impending danger, just as it is in animals. When we let it override our rationality, we make things much worse.
Reference:
Quick, J.D. and Fryer, B., 2018. The end of epidemics: The looming threat to humanity and how to stop it. St. Martin’s Press.
Deutsche Welle. 2020. âWhy coronavirus fears are disproportionate compared with other health risksâ. Accessed February 20, 2020. https://www.dw.com/en/why-coronavirus-fears-are-disproportionate-compared-with-other-health-risks/a-52281566
Zhao, S., Lin, Q., Ran, J., Musa, S.S., Yang, G., Wang, W., Lou, Y., Gao, D., Yang, L., He, D. and Wang, M.H., 2020. Preliminary estimation of the basic reproduction number of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in China, from 2019 to 2020: A data-driven analysis in the early phase of the outbreak. International Journal of Infectious Diseases.
“It is estimated that about 2% of people who have caught the coronavirus have died from it, and that they generally come from already-vulnerable groups such as older people or people with other severe illnesses” [2]āĨ¤
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