COVID-19 and Adapting to the New Normal: Lessons Learned for Peacebuilding

2021 ◽  
pp. 154231662110528
Author(s):  
Serena Clark ◽  
Claudio Alberti

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2; Covid-19) a pandemic on 11 March 2020. Unlike preceding highly contagious diseases that brought the threat of global instability this century, such as SARS-CoV, Zika virus (ZIKV), Swine flu (H1N1), and Avian flu (H5N1), Covid-19, governments across the world introduced strict measures and interruptions to daily life incomparable in living memory. Overnight, countries closed schools, higher education institutions, workplaces and shut down borders – this left people scrambling to adapt, including those implementing peacebuilding interventions. In this unprecedented situation, peacebuilding organisations have worked, responded, and adapted to the new normal. These new dynamics have created both challenges and opportunities for peacebuilding. This article documents the experiences of peacebuilders during the pandemic, making sense of changing conditions, challenges and opportunities they faced. It explores two key questions. How have peacebuilding organisations adapted during COVID-19? Has COVID-19 contributed to the move to local ownership of peacebuilding or localisation? It addresses these questions by engaging with peacebuilding organisations across different geographical regions through an online survey and key informant interviews. The main results focus on localisation, digital adaptation and funding strategy and administration challenges.

2020 ◽  

In the past 100 years, the world has faced four distinctly different pandemics: the Spanish flu of 1918-1919, the SARS pandemic of 2003, the H1N1 or “swine flu” pandemic of 2012, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Each public health crisis exposed specific systemic shortfalls and provided public health lessons for future events. The Spanish flu revealed a nursing shortage and led to a great appreciation of nursing as a profession. SARS showed the importance of having frontline clinicians be able to work with regulators and those producing guidelines. H1N1 raised questions about the nature of a global organization such as the World Health Organization in terms of the benefits and potential disadvantages of leading the fight against a long-term global public health threat. In the era of COVID-19, it seems apparent that we are learning about both the blessing and curse of social media.


Coronaviruses ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 01 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debabrata Singh ◽  
Suman Sekhar Sarangi ◽  
Milu Acharya ◽  
Surjeet Sahoo ◽  
Shakti Ketan Prusty ◽  
...  

Background: The Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization (WHO) declared novel Coronavirus (nCoV-2019) outbreaks in 2019 and is pandemic. Methods: This research work made an analysis of the nCoV-2019 outbreak in India solely based on a mathematical model. Results: The historical epidemics in the world are plague, AIDS, Swine flu, ebola, zika virus, Black Death and SARS. Considering the model used for SARS 2003, the present research on Covid-2019 estimates characteristics of rate of infectious (I) and rate of recovery(R) which leads to estimation the I and R leads to predict the number of infectious and recovery. Through ruling out the unpredictable, unreasonable data, the model predicts that the number of the cumulative 2019-nCoV cases may reach from 3398458(mid of May) to 15165863, with a peak of the unrecovered infective (2461434-15165863) occurring in late April to late July. In this paper we predicate how the confirmed infected cases would rapidly decrease until late March to July in India. We also focus how the Government of Odisha (a state of India) creates a history in the protective measures of Covid-19. Conclusion: The growing infected cases may get reduced by 70-79% by strong anti-epidemic measures. The enforcement of shutdown, lockdown, awareness, and improvement of medical and health care could also lead to about one-half transmission decrease and constructively abridge the duration of the 2019 n-CoV.


2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (03) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Ajit Shewale ◽  

Background: On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 as a “public health emergency of international concern.” In order to contain the outbreak, China used quarantine measures. India was among the first few to evacuate its citizens. Methods: It is a retrospective cohort study of Indian evacuees who returned from Wuhan, China. Standard operative procedures were developed for daily screening, sample collection, medical management, transport and referral, biomedical waste management, food safety, etc. Lessons learned were incorporated in subsequent trainings to improve effectiveness. Results: India evacuated 647 nationals including seven Maldivian citizens from Wuhan, China in many batches (with first two batches having 104 and 302 evacuees respectively) during the consecutive days of February 1st and 2nd, 2020. These 2 batches of evacuees including seven Maldivian citizens were stationed at Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) Chhawla Camp, Delhi; the first quarantine facility in India for novel Coronavirus. Rest of the spassenger were sheltered at a military quarantine facility at Manesar. Conclusion: Developing standard procedures/checklist for routine activities and effective trainings were key to successful quarantining the evacuees in the initial phase of outbreak of COVID-19.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gowhar Meraj ◽  
Majid Farooq ◽  
Suraj Kumar Singh ◽  
Shakil A. Romshoo ◽  
Sudhanshu ◽  
...  

Abstract The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has unleashed havoc across different countries and was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Since certain evidences indicate a direct relationship of various viruses with the weather (temperature in particular), the same is being speculated about COVID-19; however, it is still under investigation as the pandemic is advancing the world over. In this study, we tried to analyze the spread of COVID-19 in the Indian sub-continent with respect to the local temperature regimes from 9 March, 2020, to 27 May, 2020. To establish the relation between COVID-19 and temperature in India, three different eco-geographical regions having significant temperature differences were taken into consideration for the analysis. We observed that except Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Kashmir showed a significantly positive correlation between the number of COVID-19 cases and the temperature during the period of study. The evidences based on the results presented in this research lead us to believe that the increasing temperature is beneficial to the COVID-19 spread, and the cases are going to rise further with the increasing temperature over India. We, therefore, conclude that the existing data, though limited, suggests that the spread of COVID-19 in India is not explained by the variation of temperature alone and is most likely driven by a host of other factors related to epidemiology, socio-economics and other climatic factors. Based on the results, it is suggested that temperature should not be considered as a yardstick for planning intervention strategies for controlling the COVID-19 pandemic.


Author(s):  
Ghotekar D S ◽  
Vishal N Kushare ◽  
Sagar V Ghotekar

Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that cause illness such as respiratory diseases or gastrointestinal diseases. Respiratory diseases can range from the common cold to more severe diseases. A novel coronavirus outbreak was first documented in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China in December 2019. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) a pandemic. A global coordinated effort is needed to stop the further spread of the virus. A novel coronavirus (nCoV) is a new strain that has not been identified in humans previously. Once scientists determine exactly what coronavirus it is, they give it a name (as in the case of COVID-19, the virus causing it is SARS-CoV-2).


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (SPL1) ◽  
pp. 862-869
Author(s):  
Meena Kumari ◽  
Monika Agrawal ◽  
Rakesh Kumar Singh ◽  
Parameswarappa S Byadgi

Currently, the world is facing a health and socioeconomic crisis caused by the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19. On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared this disease as a pandemic. The condition (COVID-19) is an infectious disorder triggered by a newly discovered severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2. Most of the COVID-19 infected patients will experience mild to moderate respiratory symptoms and recover without any unique therapy. Assessment of the clinical and epidemiological characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 cases suggests the infected patients will not be contagious until the onset of severe symptoms and affects the other organs. Well-differentiated cells of apical airway epithelia communicating with ACE2 were promptly infected to SARS-CoV-2 virus. But the expression of ACE 2 in poorly differentiated epithelia facilitated SARS spike (S) protein-pseudo typed virus entry and it is replicated in polarized epithelia and especially exited via the apical surface. Limiting the transmission of COVID-19 infection & its prevention can be regarded as a hierarchy of controls. In this article, we briefly discuss the most recent advances in respect to aetiology, pathogenesis and clinical progression of the disease COVID-19.


Author(s):  
Lara Bittmann

On December 31, 2019, WHO was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan City, China. A novel coronavirus was identified as the cause by Chinese authorities on January 7, 2020 and was provisionally named "2019-nCoV". This new Coronavirus causes a clinical picture which has received now the name COVID-19. The virus has spread subsequently worldwide and was explained on the 11th of March, 2020 by the World Health Organization to the pandemic.


Author(s):  
Pooja Sharma ◽  
Karan Veer

: It was 11 March 2020 when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the name COVID-19 for coronavirus disease and also described it as a pandemic. Till that day 118,000 cases were confirmed of pneumonia with breathing problem throughout the world. At the start of New Year when COVID-19 came into knowledge a few days later, the gene sequencing of the virus was revealed. Today the number of confirmed cases is scary, i.e. 9,472,473 in the whole world and 484,236 deaths have been recorded by WHO till 26 June 2020. WHO's global risk assessment is very high [1]. The report is enlightening the lessons learned by India from the highly affected countries.


Coronaviruses ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-56
Author(s):  
Gaurav M. Doshi ◽  
Hemen S. Ved ◽  
Ami P. Thakkar

The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently announced the spread of novel coronavirus (nCoV) globally and has declared it a pandemic. The probable source of transmission of the virus, which is from animal to human and human to human contact, has been established. As per the statistics reported by the WHO on 11th April 2020, data has shown that more than sixteen lakh confirmed cases have been identified globally. The reported cases related to nCoV in India have been rising substantially. The review article discusses the characteristics of nCoV in detail with the probability of potentially effective old drugs that may inhibit the virus. The research may further emphasize and draw the attention of the world towards the development of an effective vaccine as well as alternative therapies. Moreover, the article will help to bridge the gap between the new researchers since it’s the current thrust area of research.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mujib Ullah

UNSTRUCTURED Coronaviruses belong to a large family of viruses. Coronavirus also called COVID-19 is a new disease that has not been previously identified in humans. The World Health Organization has announced that COVID-19 is a pandemic. Currently there is no specific vaccine or treatment for COVID-19. Current treatment for COVID-19 is only supportive (treating the symptoms). There are no antiviral or vaccine options at this time. Therefore, it is time to bring collective efforts to treat or prevent a rapidly evolving pandemic of COVID-19.


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