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What is the Coronavirus?


Source: Live Science
There is no denying that the Coronavirus is a controversial, and to many terrifying subject. Schools and businesses are rapidly closing, and more and more people are getting infected. I have heard many rumors daily, that range wildly from, "oh, it's not really bad, it's like a cold!" to "we're all going to die, and all because the Chinese wanted to eat bats!" Here's the thing peeps, I can't really tell you exactly what the Coronavirus is, I can only tell you what we know so far. If I told you that everything here is exactly proven, I would be lying, and would probably get slaughtered by comments in the future.

Note: Sorry I didn't get a Lorenzo Ramble up on last Wednesday/Thursday, I was really busy. If you haven't noticed I am shifting to a Wednesday/Thursday and Sunday/Monday schedule. 

What we "think" it is so far...

For one the Coronavirus is not one singular disease, but rather a "family" of viruses. This current outbreak, named COVID-19 is a "big deal" because it has never been identified within humans. Coronavirus(s) initially are caused by a transfer from animal to human. Very little is known about COVID-19 because as I said earlier it had never been seen before in humans.

Why don't we have medicine for it?

 It is difficult to create vaccines to target new viruses because of the way a virus works. Viruses infect cells, in our case, human cells and make them reproduce viral cells. What i'm really saying here is that the virus will infect your cells and use them like a copying machine to make more "mutant" viral cells. Vaccines are used to build up your body's immunity, or really it's ability to recognize and be able to fight a certain virus. Another way to fight viruses are anti-viral drugs. These medicines target the reproduction cycle of the cell causing them to not be able to rapidly reproduce and spread like they normally would. Because of the rapid reproduction that viruses have, they are constantly changing and mutating.....like inbred families from rural areas. This means that vaccines are constantly playing catch up with "this year's next hot virus."

Source: iStock

What are the symptoms?

Well from what I can gather the description of symptoms of the Coronavirus are pretty vague, but that's understandable because it is new. Here is what the World Health Organization classifies as COVID-19 symptoms: 

respiratory symptoms, fever, cough, shortness of breath and breathing difficulties. In more severe cases, infection can cause pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syndrome, kidney failure and even death. 

One of the biggest concerns about COVID-19 is that afterwards you are left vulnerable to contract pneumonia a lot more easily.  

What do I think? 

I think that people are wrong to both underestimate the Coronavirus and overestimate it. What I am really saying is to use common sense. (Applause) I know, I know revolutionary! But at this stage, we can't really gauge what COVID-19 has in store for us in the future. As I said earlier it is very easy for Virus's to mutate and reshuffle, which makes this whole ordeal more scary. I would say however if you are going out to eat.....that is not a good idea. Try to avoid large social settings, and just be a little anti social. Practice social distancing, because we have no idea what is coming and it is better to be quarantined and healthy than deathly ill. Here is a great article about social distancing (there are others too, just look it up): Vox-COVID-19 social distancing

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I have to say I am very grateful for Fox News, and their "odd news" segment! It seems a bit odd to call the police department for toilet paper, but I don't know, maybe they are just that desperate. I have to admit the TP situation is getting pretty out of hand.  


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