COVID 19 English Lesson

The COVID 19 Pandemic Lesson(s)

COVID 19 Pandemic (Text 1)

By J Greenwood (2021)

In 2020, the world dealt with a situation unprecedented in modern times: the Covid-19 pandemic. Covid-19 is a disease caused by Coronavirus, a group of viruses that includes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), both of which have been prevalent in areas of the globe in the recent past. Symptoms of these diseases range from relatively mild; including loss of smell and taste, dry cough, fever, headaches and muscle ache, to more severe consequences such as respiratory issues, organ failure and even death (Menni et al., 2020). Covid-19 seems to affect people differently depending on their age, ethnicity and physical fitness. The fact that many people who contract Covid-19 are asymptomatic is one of the key contributing factors to its rapid spread around the globe.

The origins of Covid-19 are a widely debated issue. Bolsen et al. (2020) outline two explanations that have received significant global attention:

• ‘Its origins are “zoonotic”, and the virus was transmitted “naturally” from bats to humans, possibly from a food market in Wuhan, China’ and
• ‘… a conspiracy theory that it was human-engineered and leaked, deliberately or accidentally, from a research laboratory in Wuhan, China’.

Commentators on the first theory suggest that the cause may have come from live animals stored in the food market, whose parasites spread from the animals to humans. This usually happens when an animal who has been hosting the virus comes into close contact with a human, and the virus mutates and enters a human cell (Morens et al., 2020). Critics of the first theory point to the fact that due to this strain of Coronavirus being so contagious and deadly, it is more likely to have been deliberately engineered in a lab, with the intentions of being used as an offensive biological weapon (Gertz, 2020). The real origins of the Covid-19 pandemic may never be known, but the speed with which it spread around the globe is undeniable.

The first cases on Covid-19 were confirmed in the city of Wuhan, China on December 8th , 2019 (Pan et al., 2020). It was only on 3rd January, 2020 that Chinese officials provided information to the World Health Organisation (WHO) on the ‘cluster of viral pneumonia cases from an unknown cause’ (WHO, 2020). It has been argued that this…

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COVID-19 Pandemic Lecture

 Written by C. Wilson (2021)

Hello and welcome to this lecture today on the COVID-19 virus pandemic. Since the virus was first officially identified on the 16 January 2019 in Wuhan, China, the number of COVID-19 cases has risen sharply worldwide, and hundreds of thousands of new infections are being reported every day. The virus is still ever present in almost every part of the world and mutating and creating other strains. The global spread of COVID-19 is having a devastating effect on human lives and is representing an unprecedented shock for the world’s economy.

So, I’m going to start today by looking at some of the shocking facts and figures. According to the World Health Organisation, from the second week in January 2021 there have been 99.8 million recorded COVID-19 cases and over 2.1 million COVID-19 related deaths worldwide. The figures show that the United States have the highest number of recorded cases of 26.3 million and 421 thousand COVID related deaths, followed by India in second place with 10.7 million recorded cases and 154 thousand COVID related deaths. The UK is in 5^th place with 3.6 million confirmed cases and just over 100 thousand COVID related deaths. Unfortunately, at this time all cases and deaths are still rising.

Ok, now onto a definition. It’s important to begin with a clear definition of Covid-19. This is because many media reports and people have used “coronavirus” and “Covid-19″ interchangeably. But this is not true as in fact one is actually a subset of the other. Coronavirus’ actually refers to a handful of diseases. The term refers to a group of viruses that are known to cause respiratory issues. So even though many are referring to the illness circling around right now as “coronavirus,” that’s not actually the name of the disease. “This is, technically speaking, like using the term ‘dog’ to describe a Labrador. It’s important to note that ‘Coronaviruses’ are an extremely common cause of colds and other upper respiratory infections. Some examples of previous coronaviruses include SARS and MERS.

So, COVID-19, short for “coronavirus disease 2019,” is a “novel coronavirus,” meaning it’s a new type of coronavirus that was not previously known or understood by health experts. The important point here is that Covid-19 is the illness caused by the novel coronavirus. The key difference of this virus to other coronaviruses is that it deceives the body in the early stages of infection through tricking the immune system into thinking everything is ok. A basic level description would be our body cells start releasing chemicals called interferons once a virus is detected in the body and this warns the immune system. BUT COVID-19 has an amazing capability to switch off this chemical warning system, so you don’t even know you are ill. There are no symptoms at first and often by the time you realise you have the virus; you are fully infected. Moreover, showing no symptoms means the process of passing the virus on to another person is incredibly easy as its undetectable.

Ok, let’s move onto the key symptoms of COVID-19. Some people infected with the COVID-19 virus have no symptoms. When the virus does cause symptoms, common ones include fever, body ache,…

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