Sarah Bailey MSc, WELL AP, QED Environmental Services in Australia, takes a look at the ‘basics’ of the coronavirus, and discusses some of the key steps that can be taken both within buildings,& in the wider community, to mitigate the virus’s spread
As this article goes to print, it is over a year since Australia entered the first lockdown due to COVID-19, an event that heralded a massive change in the way we live, work, buy toilet rolls, and socialise. For most people, this was the first pandemic in Australia in living memory, as the semiregular Influenza pandemics (of 1957, 1968, and 2009) that have occurred since the infamous 1918 pandemic, and spikes in infection and deaths from Influenza such as in 2019 – where over 900 people died – are often dismissed by the public as a ‘normal’ occurrence, as ‘flu is familiar, and does not generate the kind of interest (and panic) that a novel disease does.
Previous pandemics have not had the social impact upon Australia that COVID19 has had – there was short-lived panic about the Swine ‘Flu in 2009, the first SARS outbreak, in 2003, and the MERS – Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, in 2012, but this did not translate into issues for the country that impacted day to day living. COVID-19 very quickly became something very different, and has changed the world as we know it, leaving no part of the globe unaffected.
Rapidly changing information
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