Final Project Milestone One: Health Issue Principles of Epidemiology 24EW3 Brianna Howard
Covid-19 does not discriminate against any race, gender or nationality so understanding the symptoms and risks of this disease is important. Risk factors can be a condition, characterizes or behavior that will increase the likelihood of getting that disease or injury. Understanding the risks of diseases will help an individual and or population become more aware and preventive. When specially speaking about COVID-19, Dr. Haitham Bashier (2020), states "Common symptoms include fever, cough, fatigue, shortness of breath, and loss of smell and taste. While the majority of cases result in mild symptoms, some progress to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) possibly precipitated by cytokine storm, multiorgan failure, septic shock, and blood clots.". Providing this information to the public can help mitigate some risks of the population exposing themselves to COVID-19 and if they have these symptoms, they can isolate themselves from others. According to the CDC, the mode of transmission of COVID is coughing, sneezing, talking and even singing. (CDC 2022) Touching surfaces and transmitting germs is another way of spreading COVID around to other communities. Dr Haitham Bashier (2020), explains that "Given the initial link between cases and a live animal market, as well as other coronaviruses that have animal reservoirs, an animal source seems the most likely primary source of the outbreak, with some human-to-human transmission occurring". This is an example of a vector bringing the disease to another location and or community. Prevalence is described as the number of cases where a disease spreads within the population as where incidence is the rate of new cases within the population. Table 1 shows us how quickly, once exposed, COVID can travel and transmit through a country. As you review the timeline of how quicky more and more people become infected and exposed more people. The beginning of the chart, the first column, shows us prevalence of numbers who were exposed to COVID. The
further you look over the chart, the number of cases increases which shows us the incidence side of the pandemic. Below I have calculated the incidence: 12131/7,821,000,000 =0.00001551 The mortality rate is a measure of the number of deaths in a population from a cause or disease over a set period of time. The number of confirmed deaths according to table two is 259 deaths. As we know, in today's current state of covid rates, this number is still increasing. Table two statistics is from 2020 so an updated chart would better determine a more accurate number. In 2024, we now have other options to decrease the rate of deaths within the world and have preventive systems to help protect the population from spreading the disease.