Epidemic vs Pandemic - What are we Living?

bybalilux

628 followers

4 years ago

Epidemic and Pandemic have been loosely interchanged for many years but I suppose it has never been as evident as now. What exactly is the difference between diseases of epidemic scale and pandemic scale.

The Bone of Contention between Outbreak, Epidemic and Pandemic

Covid-19 has got us in a total tangle and it is not just for health reasons. We are suffering insomnia, relationship breakdowns, curfew, economic breakdown and fear. Uncertainty is the name of this Corona Virus game.

But Covid-19 has us now totally entangled over whether it is an outbreak, an epidemic or a pandemic. Let us say that The Corona Virus has earned all its titles with honours.

Let us start by explaining and defining one and the other.

Definition of a Viral Outbreak

An outbreak of a virus is a sudden increase of a disease where the occurrence is located to a particular place and time. It usually affects a small and localized containment of people. Once an outbreak spreads and there are linked cases of rare and infectious diseases it gets promoted to the status epidemic.

An Outbreak of Epidemic Proportions

So what is the difference between Outbreak and Epidemy? An Epidemic is a very quick and rapid spread of an outbreak. The disease is usally highly infectious and it will affect a lot of people within a very short span of time.

An epidemic however, is contained within an area and a given population. The scale that determines Epidemic proportions are those with an attack rate of 15 per 100,000 for fifteen consecutive days. Those numbers are enough to brand an infectious outbreak as an epidemic.

The Ebola Virus - visualised

So what earns its name is an outbreak that reaches Epic proportions - and I am not sure of that but it sounds good.

The truth from the name derivate is actually attributed to Homer's Odyssey where we find the first mention of Epidemic when speaking of the Plague of Athens and that it was of endemic proprotions. It was meant to give an idea of the proportions of the the spread of the disease.

Since then, Epidemic, has always triggered fireworks of emotionally charged feelings.

Epidemic is localised. It is a documented fact. Once it spreads from one community type to another and worse still from one country to another, then it gets promoted to the status of Pandemic.

A few examples of Epidemics. The outbreak of the Zika virus (2016-2017) which spread by mosquitos in tropical areas and which in turn spread by people traveling from those areas. Zika was not a killer. However, it produced mutations resulting in birth defects in women who got it when pregnant.

Ebola (2014-2016-2019) was an outbreak in West Africa that most of us remember. It was originally discovered in Congo as early as 1976 but the real outbreak was in 2018/19. If not treated Ebola is a killer and out of almost 30k cases, Ebola took away the lives of 11k.

SARS - Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome - disrupted not just health by also the travel industry at the time. The virus started in Asia in 2003 and became an epidemic. SARS was on the news daily at the time. It totally affected 8089 people of which 774 died. Although there were cases outside of Asia - they were purely associated with travel from the areas where it originally emanated.

An Epidemic that Creates Pandemonium

Again, I am playing with you. In my research I have not found anything that co-relates pandemic with pandemonium. Having said that if anyone has witnessed the pillage of toilet paper, amongst other things, in invariably every country in the world, you would be forgiven for confusing the two. Why toilet paper and not soap is beyond me but I will leave that to another blog post.

So what makes an Epidemic become a Pandemic? The word Pandemic is used to describe a situation where the disease has spread over many borders, countries and affects a large number of people.

The last known Pandemic to wreak havoc was the Spanish Flu in 1918.

An estimated 500 million people from the Southern Pacific Ocean to the North Pole fell victim to Spanish Flu. It is estimated that between 50 - 100 million died from the Spanish Flu. Although this was an influenza, it is not likely that it originated from Spain as Spain was neutral at the time. So communities and indegenous tribes were pushed to the point of extinction with this pandemic. The fact that it was wartime and the soldiers had very poor nutrition and even worse living conditions meant that the spread was even more viral than it should have been.

As of the time that I am writing this article Corona Virus cases have topped 300,000 with over 14,000 deaths around the world. Italy alone has seen 4825 deaths in the past three weeks which has already surpassed the amount of deaths in China!

The effects of COVID-19 are respiratory (like SARS - it is from the same virus mutation). Oxygen machines, and other respiratory equipment, as well as qualified staff are vital for saving lives and clearly some countries are coping worse than others.

Let me not loose the wood for the trees. The reason for which I am writing this article is certainly not inspired from any medical background but it is coming from a quest of Etymology. (I had to look that up because I kept misspelling it)

I was reading a Facebook post by a rather important CEO representing a body of workers in my country and he kept having Freudian slips between Epidemic and Pandemic. So I thought it is high time that I get to the bottom of the matter.

Epidemic vs Pandemic - Conclusion

The conclusion is just the matter of scale. Outbreak is the first sign, Epidemic is localized and Pandemic is a global spread. The number of people affected all over the world in the case of COVID-19 leave no doubt as to which end of the scale it leans to.

To some extent we bloggers are all suffering from another scale of writing pandemic. We seem to be obsessing about the same subject every minute and day of our lives which is natural since we are all paralyzed by the fear of the unknown and seeing people we love grappled with this deadly virus.

I hope that you enjoyed a little bit of humour and information on a very serious situation. A little bit of trivia never hurt anyone.

As always I want to thank the carers, the nurses and the doctors who are daily risking their lives to keep us alive