I watched a documentary on Netflix about this pandemic. Having more knowledge on the subject will allow me to accurately show the topic. It was really interesting because the Explained programme did a documentary late last year, before the pandemic started, about what would happen if there happened to be a pandemic. Little did they know that one was about to happen.
The episode from last year said there was 1 and half million virus’ in wildlife and it could take just one getting into the human population to become catastrophic. People in infectious disease knew it was coming. They said that if there was a pandemic, the world would not be prepared!
There was a lot of scientific explanation about Covid-19 which was interesting, but it won’t influence my work. They said about how it is spread through, nose, mouth and eyes. It’s not easily recognisable as people display flu like symptoms or sometimes no symptoms at all. This makes it so easily spread. Virus’ have a balance between infectiousness and deadliness. Highly deadly ones are normally less infectious as the symptoms are obvious and people often die meaning they can not spread it to people.
What I found most interesting in the documentary is how we respond to it. For things to go back to normal as much as possible, there needs to be a vaccine. For now social distancing/quarantine, will slow down the spread until the vaccine is found. If too many people are infected at once healthcare can’t cope and more people are likely to die. The lockdown will suppress the curve, then we have to gradually come out of the lockdown to prevent a second peak.
There was a diagram in the documentary of how many people would have been affective if China had locked down 3 weeks earlier, there would have been a 95% cut in cases. It makes me wonder about the UK. Governments downplayed the virus to begin with, we were simply told ‘wash your hands’ and now we have one of the highest death rates in Europe.
This research has got me thinking a lot more deeply about Coronavirus and how things could of been different. It is scary to think that another pandemic could easily happen again but be more devastating. These emotions are familiar to a lot of people right now and this is what I want to be able to show in the portraits. There is an overwhelming feeling of uncertainty.
Lucy Davis 