The rapidly-evolving coronavirus has officials giving daily updates, issuing new guidelines and presenting ever-changing numbers of those affected. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 is now a pandemic.
Dr. Trina von Waldner is a faculty member in UGA’s College of Pharmacy.
“Epidemics are limited primarily to a single country, could even be an area of a country, or even a continent,” von Waldner said. “One we see every year is our seasonal influenza epidemic, but it’s in different countries at different times based on their seasonality. This has not been affected by seasonality. We still don’t know exactly how the seasons will change and affect it, but we know that it is surviving whether it’s summer, winter, spring or fall where ever you live.
An epidemic is an outbreak of disease that attacks many people at about the same time and may spread through one or several communities. A pandemic is when an epidemic spreads throughout the world.
Experts say the world has a history of pandemics.
“Many people have probably heard of the 1918 pandemic. It was a flu pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people. We don’t have that going on. We have wonderful infection control and public health policies, but one thing we do know is continuing is the HIV pandemic. It was an epidemic for many years, it took years for it to evolve into a pandemic, the difference with this is that it only took months.”
Dr. von Waldner says she expects the pandemic to eventually be brought under control.
“It’s going to take some time and very strong policies and it’s going to take all sectors of society working together to address this.”
Georgia had its first confirmed coronavirus death Thursday.
