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COVID-19: A Perspective on Human Fragility Guillermo Balderrabano Bachelor in Biomedical Sciences
Since December 2019, humanity has been experiencing the beginning of an event that is bound to change the course and perspective of modern societies, namely, the new disease caused by the coronavirus, or COVID-19 (Wu et al., 2020). The first case of this disease was reported in Wuhan, China (Huang et al., 2020), and it later spread throughout that country before crossing the borders of more than other 190 countries worldwide (Worldometer, 2020). The disease caused by the coronavirus is not new in terms clinical symptoms, which can also occur in severe acute respiratory syndromes (SARS), such as fever, fatigue, and muscle pain, sometimes followed by massive alveolar damage and progressive respiratory failure. Its mortality rate, however, is alarmingly high when it affects older people (those over sixty) and people with some underlying medical condition (such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, or chronic respiratory disease) (World Health Organization, 2020).
Although some measures have been taken at global level (such as restrictions on international flights) and these have successfully slowed down proliferation in certain countries by anywhere from 40% to 90% (Chinazzi et al., 2020), they have not been sufficiently effective at the local level to prevent the spread of the virus. The process of local transmission also involves contact with asymptomatic people, who are in the incubation phase of the virus, which can last five or six days (World Health Organization, 2020; Bai et al., 2020), as well as with people in the infectious phase (up to the days after the incubation phase), who continue to spread the disease (Zou et al., 2020). As a result, prophylactic measures are sometimes undermined by time issues or by a lack of social responsibility and willingness to adopt proper hygiene and isolation practices.
