2020 marks the fourth decade of the 20’s in a row to have an outbreak of disease, and BASH has their opinions by Jared Anderson

In 1720, Marsellie, France, was hit by a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague that killed over one hundred thousand people in the course of two years. In the 1820’s, a massive cholera outbreak spread over the Eastern hemisphere, affecting an unknown number of people until late 1824. The beginning of the 1920’s saw a worldwide spread of the Spanish flu, and affected over five hundred million people and killed anywhere from fifty million to one hundred million people. And now, in 2020, we’re dealing with a small scale outbreak of the Coronavirus, and so far over six thousand people have been infected.

I took to the halls of BASH to get answers from students on their thoughts of the Coronavirus. Many people didn’t have much to say on the matter, but some were also full of thoughts on the topic, and what could be done to start heading in the right direction for a solution. 

The first question I asked people is what they thought of the recent outbreak of the Coronavirus in China. The most common response I got was that it was worrying, and that they were blown away by how fast it was spreading, but one answer I had heard stuck out amongst the rest. One student said that the Center of Disease Control and Prevention, or the CDC, should step in and declare the virus a worldwide emergency, and that the public should know more about it.

 The second question I asked students, was how they felt about the fact that the virus had already spread to the United States, and all the responses I got were about how concerning it is that it spread here already, and that populated areas should be the biggest concern. The third question I asked the students was how they found out about the virus, and most of them told me they had heard of it through social media, or like me, they found out through one of their teachers. The last question I asked people was their thoughts on how the past three 20’s decades have seen massive scale outbreaks of plagues and diseases, and how 2020 is still following that pattern. Most students said it was a crazy or freak coincidence, and one student went so far as to call it “an act of God”, just to show how absurd the outbreaks in almost every past 20’s decade have been.

The Coronavirus is no joke, and it’s spreading rapidly, not just the disease itself, but the traction it is getting in the media. All this media coverage is good, because it is spreading awareness to everyone in the world that the virus is out there, and there needs to be a solution before it becomes even more uncontrolled.