Yea, Corona, What About It?

COVID-19 in layman’s terms or: ten things not to shake right now

okay, so by now you’ve probably all heard of that thing called corona (the disease, not the beer water). scientifically, corona goes by the name of COVID-19, which is short for Cerumen-Opneumonoultramicroscopic-Volcano-Iosis-Diaphragmatic-19 — jk, it just stands for COrona VIrus Disease; and 19 because, well, it started last year.

okay, now that we’ve got that sorted out, let’s delve into the nitty-gritty of the issue, shall we?

5 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW

1) the coronavirus outbreak is a pandemic: which means it spreads around the entire globe and affects pretty much each and every one of us. yea, #panDAMNic.

2) as a response, earth has (temporarily) closed: you may have noticed (or not) that your school is closed; if you haven’t, I’m sure you did notice that everything else has been closed, cancelled or postponed as well, including: NBA, UEFA Champions League, Coachella, the new James Bond No Time to Die, several BTS concerts (for all ya little k-pop STANs out there) and even DISNEY WORLD has been SHUT DOWN. so if you haven’t before, you should feel affected now.

3) people are scared: and that’s okay. COVID-19 has never existed in the entire history of humankind, and people fear what they don’t (immediately) understand.

4) corona is pretty damn sneaky: generally speaking, a virus like corona is a very tiny thing—so tiny you need a microscope to see it—and it wants to get inside another body to make lots of copies of itself. basically, just like your willy. plus, it can stay unnoticed inside a person for up to 2 weeks. (also just like, well ..).

5) it’s not like the flu — it’s like the flu on steroids: luckily, there are some smarter monkeys amongst us, who have worked day and night to rapidly get a grasp on how this thing (they call it: SARS-Cov-9) actually works.

and while there’s still a lot of stuff we don’t quite get about corona, we for sure know how it’s transmitted: GERMS. (no, hollywood, that’s not short for Germans, and this is also not the beginning of WWIII — although, admittedly it does feel like it.)

meaning anytime someone around you coughs or sneezes, an army of these germs land on all sort of things and sticks there (sometimes for a few days) and when you get it on your hands and rub it in your eyes, your mouth or your nose (or God knows where else you usually stick your fingers in), you get the virus. scientists call this process ‘droplet transmission’.

and to make things worse: while the physical symptoms do resemble it, corona isn’t at all ‘just like the flu’. if anything, it’s like flu on steroids: it spreads faster, there’s no vaccine available (yet), and people — especially the sick and the elderly — are much more likely to die from it.