COVID-19: follow the advice of health professionals
BOTH the rapid and ongoing spread of COVID-19 that originated in Wuhan last December and the threat that the viral infection poses continue to be of concern.
Viruses are regarded as ‘biological entities’ and as such are classified into families and higher groups as is the case with plants, animals and the multitude of other life forms that we share the planet with.
‘Corona’ is the Latin for a crown, envelope or halo. Corona viruses were first discovered in the 1960s. They are a small family of typically ball-shaped particles and are so called because each individual has projections or spikes sticking out of its body reminiscent of a crown.
Viruses don’t occur in the fossil record so, since there is no evidence of how they originated, there is much debate about where they came from and how they evolved.
Wherever they originated, there are a lot of different kinds of them and they can change or mutate rapidly. About 5000 viruses have been documented to date and, no doubt, many more have yet to be discovered.
They are unbelievably tiny, so tiny that ordinary light microscopes can’t see them. Over one hundred million typical viruses lying head to toe in a straight line would be needed to cover the diameter of the full stop at the end of this sentence.
Their main purpose in life is to reproduce and spread and they do that very simply by making copies or replicas of themselves. One individual makes two, the two become four, four make eight and the exponential process continues ad infinitum.
To do all that replication, viruses need energy and a supply of building materials. They get both by infecting other life forms: they are all infectious agents or parasites. They cannot survive for long outside of a host be it a plant, animal, person or even a bacterium. As long as they get into a host they thrive. Otherwise they perish.
When they get into a host their numbers explode causing the host to get sick. In the case of the present outbreak, the sickness is ‘coronavirus disease’ otherwise known as COVID-19, short for ‘Corona Virus Disease 2019’ whereas the virus itself is codenamed SARS-CoV-2, short for ‘Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2’.
To combat the spread of COVID-19, we need to look after ourselves and each other, to stay healthy and to follow the advice of the public health and medical professionals.