Check

Running Head: COVID-19 1

COVID-19 2

COVID-19

Student’s name

Institutional Affiliation

Introduction

COVID-19 is a virus that causes breathing difficulty, causes pressure, chest pain, and loss of movement and speech. However, the less severe symptoms include tiredness, dry cough, and fewer. The name was given by the World Health Organization (WHO) since the disease is caused by a novel coronavirus SARS-CoV2 (Sohrabi, Alsafi, O'Neill, Khan, Kerwan, Al-Jabir & Agha, 2020). The first case of COVID-19 was reported in Wuhan, China, and over six months; it had spread almost in all parts of the world.

The body

Healthcare workers have always been at the forefront in mitigating the effect of any diseases affecting people. The emerging of the COVID-19 caught the health workers off guard. The healthcare personnel lacked the expertise to fight the virus, few masks, PPTs, and insufficient ICU beds to accommodate the most critical patients. The healthcare personnel's aspect is interacting with COVID-19 patients daily; they are more vulnerable to contracting the virus. Since the discovery of the vaccine, healthcare personnel is the first people to e vaccinated.

Earlier on, individuals who contracted the virus were stigmatized by society and their families isolated from the rest of the community. The worst scenario occurred when people who were quarantined were declared safe to interact with the rest of the society. Most of those individuals were stigmatized making causing others to suffer depression and other psychological health conditions. To prevent stigmatization and psychological stress among the COVID-19 survivors' various support groups were formed to enlighten members of the society more about COVID-19. One of those groups is the COVID-19 Support Group which is more active in the social media platforms such as Facebook.

The COVID-19 Support Group supports establishing education-based programs to educate society members about a wide variety of COVID-19 symptoms that are less but commonly experienced by most of the COVID-19 survivors (Viswanathan, Myers & Fanous, 2020). Based on the article “My coronavirus survivor group is my most important medical support right now” gives an example of a thirty-two years old man, Lauren Nichols, who had contacted the COVID-19 but failed to seek medication for having been suffering from symptoms that were not common with COVID-19 patients.

The most uncommon symptoms of COVID-19 include diarrhea, vomiting, nausea, and loss of smell and taste (Klopfenstein, Zahra, Lepiller, Royer, Toko, Gendrin & Zayet, 2020). Therefore, I recommend the COVID-19 Support Groups educate people from various social media platforms on uncommon symptoms of COVID-19 to seek earlier medication to prevent severe health conditions.

COVID-19 Support Group can interact with administration and local authorities across the globe. Citizens should be educated on why they should retest for COVID-19 after quarantine and before interacting with other family members and societies. Through interactions between individuals across the globe through COVID-19 Support Groups, individuals become aware of the reasons why they should extend isolation beyond doctor's recommendations.

The COVID-19 Support Group should also address issues against discrimination and medical bias to the black people in the United States. Based on the article, blacks are being turned away from urgent care centers and emergency rooms. Racial discrimination in the health sector leads to more death of the black than their white counterparts. According to the article, Michelle Lemus was dismissed from the hospitals regardless of clear COVID-19 symptoms. According to him, the doctor opted to give him antibiotics; according to him, he was not provided with quality care since he is a black person.

Conclusion

All over the world, citizens' movement has been restricted as a mitigation strategy to minimize and stop the virus's spread. Therefore, people cannot be able to consult the healthcare facility on the matter related to COVID-19. People must use the COVID-19 Support Group to interact with people across the group and get advice on avoiding and managing the virus.

References

Klopfenstein, T., Zahra, H., Lepiller, Q., Royer, P. Y., Toko, L., Gendrin, V., & Zayet, S. (2020). New loss of smell and taste: Uncommon symptoms in COVID-19 patients in Nord Franche-Comte cluster, France. International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 100, 117-122.

Sohrabi, C., Alsafi, Z., O'Neill, N., Khan, M., Kerwan, A., Al-Jabir, A., ... & Agha, R. (2020). World Health Organization declares global emergency: A review of the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19). International journal of surgery, 76, 71-76.

Viswanathan, R., Myers, M. F., & Fanous, A. H. (2020). Support groups and individual mental health care via video conferencing for frontline clinicians during the COVID-19 pandemic. Psychosomatics, 61(5), 538-543.