As the newcoronaviruscontinues to spread around the domain , the wordsepidemicandpandemicare present up in news paper more often than they usually do . While the term are closely related , they do n’t denote to the same affair .
As the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology ( APIC ) explains on itswebsite , “ an epidemic appears when an infectiousdiseasespreads rapidly to many citizenry . ” normally , what precedes an epidemic is an outbreak , or “ a sudden boost in the number of case of a disease . ” An outbreak can affect a single community or several countries , but it ’s on a much smaller plate than an epidemic .
If an epidemic ca n’t be contained and keeps expanding its scope , public health official might begin call it a pandemic , which means it ’s affected enough people in different areas of the world to be considered a world-wide outbreak . In short , a pandemic is a world epidemic . It infects more mass , causes more dying , and can also have widespread societal and economic repercussions . The cattle ranch of theSpanish influenzafrom 1918 to 1919 , which killed between 20 and 40 million people around the world , was a pandemic ; more lately , the H1N1 influenza created a pandemic in 2009 .
Here ’s where it gets a little tricky : There ’s no track - and - dry categorization scheme for outbreaks , epidemic , and pandemic . free-base on the definitions above , it might seem like the current coronavirus disease , now called COVID-19 , fall into the pandemic class already — according to amapfrom the World Health Organization ( WHO ) , there are more than 80,000 support case in 34 countries , and nearly 2700 the great unwashed have died from the disease . It ’s also begin toimpacttravel , stock markets , and the spherical economy as a whole . But WHO maintains that although the situation has the potential to become a pandemic , it ’s still an epidemic for now .
“ It really is borderline semantics , to be good with you , ” Anthony Fauci , director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , toldCNN earlier this calendar month . “ I think you could have people arguing each end of it . pandemic entail different things to different people . ”
[ h / tAPIC.org ]
