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Unprecedented pandemic, unprecedented shift, and unprecedented opportunity

2020; Wiley; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/hbe2.192

2578-1863

Zheng Yan,

Media Influence and Health

The COVID-19 pandemic is currently spreading across the world in an unprecedented way.As of March 24, 20,203, among 169 countries in the world, the total accumulative confirmed cases are 387,382, and the total number of death is 16,767 (Johns Hopkins University, 2020).This pandemic has been compared to the Second World War or the Great Depression in terms of its wide scope and broad impact.One unique impact stands out among its various types of impacts on public heath, economic, political, education, and many others sectors of the modern society.That is, the COVID-19 pandemic forces humans to social isolations in order to control the extremely infectious coronavirus.Currently, different countries have been using different methods of social isolations.These methods include: voluntary self-isolation, mandatory quarantine, travel restrictions, stay-at-home order, shutdowns of restaurants, theaters, churches, sports venues, museums, and other social organizations, closures of schools and universities, working at home, limits or closures of transportations such as airplanes, trains, buses, and ships, closures of country borders, declaration of state of emergency, and lockdowns of entire cities, entire regions, and entire countries.Nowadays, social distancing has become the latest buzzword in the headlines of media covering the COVID-19 pandemic.One recent example is that the world-renowned opera singer Plácido Domingo has tested positive for the coronavirus on March 22, 2020, and he is in self-isolation at home (Chen & Lee, 2020).Another heartbreaking example is that a holocaust survivor Arie Even passed away on March 21, 2020 as the first coronavirus death case in Israel, but his family was unable to be with him during his final days to avoid getting the virus (Estrin, 2020).While it appears to be as novel as it is now, social distancing actually is traditional public health measures used for decades during major influenza virus outbreaks (Wilder-Smith & Freedman, 2020).These public health measures typically include isolating ill persons, contact tracing, quarantining exposed persons, school closures, workplace closures, and avoiding crowding.Technically, the basic idea of social distancing is to reduce risks of person-to-person transmission by "delaying the epidemic peak, reducing the size of the epidemic peak, and spreading cases over a longer time to relieve pressure on the healthcare system" (