In these moments of crisis, people believe that coronavirus is the worst of the diseases that happened to humanity; but actually, there are worse and more dangerous illnesses.
What happens is just that people turned a blind eye because those diseases aren't affecting them directly, as covid-19 is doing. So, here are some of those sicknesses that have affected the world and maybe you didn't know about:
1. HIV/AIDS
At the end of 2018, approximately 37.9 million people worldwide were living with HIV. In the same year, 770,000 people died from HIV-related causes and 1.7 million people were newly infected. Since the virus was first discovered, more than 32 million people worldwide have died as a result of HIV, according to the WHO.
2. Ebola
Right now, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is fighting the world’s second-largest Ebola epidemic on record. As of this writing, 2,249 people have died and 3,432 have been infected since the outbreak was declared in August 2018, according to the WHO.
3. MERS
COVID-19 isn’t the only coronavirus in town these days. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) is caused by a rare but deadly coronavirus mostly found in Saudi Arabia.
Since it was first identified in 2012, MERS has infected 2,499 people and caused 861 deaths globally, according to the WHO. Clearly, that’s just a fraction of the numbers reported for COVID-19, but the difference is in the mortality rate. MERS has had a mortality rate as high as 37.2% compared with the current estimated mortality rate of 2% to 3% for COVID-19.
Like COVID-19, infection from MERS coronavirus (MERS-CoV) shows symptoms of fever, cough, and shortness of breath. Unlike COVID-19, MERS-CoV infection often stems from camels.
4. Hepatitis
Viral hepatitis caused an annual 1.34 million deaths worldwide in 2015. While deaths due to other infectious diseases have declined, deaths due to viral hepatitis have actually increased—by 22%—since 2000, according to a WHO report.
Approximately 325 million people, or 4.4% of the world’s population, have viral hepatitis. And 1.75 million new infections of hepatitis C alone occur each year.
We have to take into account that yes, Covid-19 has made a lot of damage in our society, but there are worse things in our world and if we have passed them and got stronger, so will we do with this actual virus. Stay home, stay save.
#yomequedoencasa
Andrés Argel, Susana Rengifo, Step 10
