Strategy for a Pandemic: The UK and COVID-19

Abstract

globally each year. 6 In England, 17,000 people a year are estimated to die annually from flu, but this varies notably according to levels of pre-existing immunity to the prevalent strain, the take-up of the available vaccine and how well it has anticipated that year's strains of flu. Thus, in 2014-15 some 28,330 people died, while in 2018-19 the number was down to 1,692. 7 The 2019-20 seasonal winter flu was no more virulent than usual, did not impose great demands on hospitals and intensive-care units (ICUs) and did not lead to an exceptional number of deaths. 8 Pandemics occur when a new and highly contagious viral infection appears for which there is no population immunity, a vaccine has yet to be developed and treatments are unavailable. One pandemic regularly recalled from the pre-vaccination age is the 'Spanish' flu that lasted from 1918-20, infecting up to a billion people worldwide and killing between 50 and 100 million. 9 More recently, the 'Asian' flu of 1957-58, which began in southern China, and the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69 were both thought to have infected up to 500m people globally and led to 1-4m deaths. In 2009, the so-called 'swine' flu infected around a billion people with estimated deaths of at least 150,000, but more likely closer to 500,000. Not all outbreaks killed as many as feared: the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and associated with camels, was deadly for about a third of those infected, but produced only around 2,000 cases. SARS, to which the current virus is most closely related, began, also in China, in November 2002, and by July 2003 had resulted in 8,437 cases and 813 deaths in 32 countries. Almost 95% of the cases were in the Western Pacific region. 10 The outbreak began with some atypical pneumonia cases in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong among people who handled food or sold wild animals. There were delays in reporting it, at first nationally and then internationally. Within China, administrative barriers and political disincentives prevented bad news getting to the capital. It was not until 11 February 2003 that the local authority reported the outbreak. Beijing resisted requests by the WHO for permission to send an investigative team. Soon it reached Vietnam,

Risk Reduction of COVID-19 Pandemic in Pakistan

“…Moreover, the risk reeducation is minimized significantly by adding the respiratory hygienic conditions among individuals such as wearing masks, washing of mouth properly, cover nose and mouth while cough and sneezing (Jianhua, 2020). These study findings are also supported and similar to the several pieces of research conducted on the subject under discussions such as Hartley and Jarvis (2020), Freedman (2020), and Assessor (2020).…”

“…Therefore, individuals are trying to opt for respiratory hygiene and social isolation for their care from the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is asserted that respiratory hygiene and social isolation has been found as a risk reduction of COVID-19 pandemic (Asim et al, 2020;Freedman, 2020). Moreover, using PPE also results in positive effects on risk reduction of the current outbreak (Foong, Teo, Wang, & Loh, 2020).…”

“…Here, people opt PPE to protect themselves from the COVID-19 pandemic (Desouky, 2020). By the same token, opting for respiratory hygienic conditions significantly minimized the risks of the outbreak (Freedman, 2020;Jianhua, 2020). As a result, people are minimizing the risk of current pandemic situations through washing mouth, covering nose and mouth while coughing or sneezing (Hoang, Hoang, Khuong, La, & Tran, 2020;Hogan, 2020).…”

“…Recent year has been observed as a massive level COVID-19 outbreak in all over the world (Freedman, 2020;Leong et al, 2020;Lum, Shi, Wong, & Wong, 2020;Sadhu et al, 2020). It affects most of the countries adversely such as China (Jianhua, 2020;Li et al, 2020), United States, Italy (Stefanini, Azzolini, & Condorelli, 2020), United Kingdom (Freedman, 2020), Spain and France (WHO, 2020a), Australia (Shakespeare-Finch et al, 2020), Turkey (Haktanir, Seki, & Dilmaç, 2020), Hong Kong (Hartley & Jarvis, 2020), Africa (Ezenwa et al, 2020), and Pakistan (Khan et al, 2020;Noreen et al, 2020) including other countries (WHO, 2020a(WHO, , 2020b(WHO, , 2020c. It is pertinent here to mention that this outbreak results in multiple problems including fear and death at a large level (Hussain et al, 2020).…”

“…Thus, several organizations started to work for its prevention including World Health Organization (WHO). Multiple protective measures and procedures are introduced to adopt such as hand and respiratory hygiene (Sadhu et al, 2020), social distancing (Mostafa & Hegazy, 2020), social isolation (Banerjee & Rai, 2020), and personal protective equipment (PPE) to reduce the risk of COVID-19 (Daigle, Leung, Yin, Kalin-Hajdu, & Nijhawan, 2020;Freedman, 2020). Several types of research also assert the factors of pandemic risk reduction such as social isolation by Banerjee and Rai (2020), the social distance by Chatterjee (2020), hand and respiratory hygiene by Ramesh, Siddaiah, and Joseph (2020), and COVID-19 pandemic risk reduction by Chatterjee (2020).…”