COVID-19 The Untapped Solutions

Mohamed Buheji, Dunya Ahmed

• Publisher: Westwood Books Publishing, LLC
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781648037405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Science General

The Purpose of the 'Untapped Solutions'

The purpose of this book is to bring to the world pragmatic 'untapped solutions' that show how the 'Inspiration Economy' would tackle the variety of challenges and exploit their opportunities, during and after COVID-19. Each solution brings a type of framework that could help in exploiting the opportunities for a better world, especially as we enter the 'new normal'. The frameworks in this book integrate the human challenges, with the complex socio-economic problems that occurred as a result of the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of the 'untapped solutions' is to improve the world ability to respond to outbreaks similar to COVID-19, and prepare for future scenarios. The book shows that the world has many opportunities to exploit, and that the implementation of these opportunities could be accelerated to prevent further negative spillovers. The 'untapped solutions' mostly would be around the Life and Livelihood, which for short called the (2L's). Focusing on these 2L's would help to save lives and at the same time, improve the way we respond to outbreaks in general.

The COVID-19 'Untapped Solutions' is meant to be the name of this book since the solutions are beyond finding the right treatments and the proper vaccines for COVID-19. As we enter the new normal, in post-COVID-19, we need to explore more the type of coming systems patterns and processes that would be needed for the next journey. This book brings hopefully many insights about the possible areas where we need to invest more to instantly access the opportunities of the epidemic.

PART ONE

Life

To live in a dilemma of whether to opt for life or livelihood is something not always experienced by most recent generations all over the world. In this book, we show that we can choose to be agile and balance both the choices of life and livelihood, in a creative manner. Our life is full of challenges and opportunities; however, the crisis of COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented complex problems that never been fully experimented by contemporary humanity. This part shows how life could bring us opportunities for a better world that bring resilient solutions, even during disaster times. These ‘resilient solutions’ could come from raising our capacity to trace potential risk spots, or proactively stop them from the source. Other resilient solutions could come from mitigating these risks, or hazards once they occur.

The first part of this book emphasis that people must engage themselves in life-related activities, if they want to sustain and develop their choices for livelihood. Therefore, we need to do more research on a variety of opportunities that this highly contagious pandemic threat, whether these threats are relative to our physical and/or mental health. Indulging into the details of these threats, as the authors believe, is what is going to bring for us both the short- and long-term solutions. Some of these solutions work as prevention from virus transmission; other solutions are deployed as treatment. Also, part of life protection and learning are the lessons learned from the front-line, the safety issues, and the resilience issues. These life solutions can be achieved by many factors as: differential diagnosis and psycho-social factors mentioned in the coming chapters.

The efforts taken by the inspiration economy experts and researchers in seeing the niches and restoring life, in this part open the possibilities of redesigning our current Life for a better future.

Section One

COVID-19 Pandemic as a Complex Problem

Figure (S-1) Chapters of Section One

CHAPTER ONE

Coronavirus as a Global Complex Problem Looking for Resilient Solutions1

1.0 Introduction

COVID-19 and its impact is now a complex global problem looking for a resilient solution that addresses the problem beyond its current context, i.e. a public health crisis. The resilient solution could come from defining, codifying, classifying and then stratifying the variables or the constructs of this life-threatening complex problem. Then, based on understanding these variables, we can determine the resources and the strategies needed. Buheji (2018), McGrath and Sargut (2011).

The events of the coronavirus, since its outbreak for the first three months, are reviewed and synthesised. COVID-19 outbreak is explored as a zoonotic problem, then the vaccine development is clarified as a limited corrective not preventive solution for this problem. The novel challenge of the coronavirus problem and how it is influencing the psychology of the people is discussed. The complexity of the COVID-19 is mentioned in relevance to the need for the case method as an approach for such a complex problem. Wu et al. (2020), Drohan (2020).

The author shows that the common solutions for such a complex global problem are quarantine, social isolation, treatment of difficult cases, and searching for medicines or vaccine to treat or prevent people from the virus. However, knowing the nature and the history of the zoonotic virus and their ability to modify itself, such a solution are not sustainable.

The chapter identifies specific linkages that go with the spread of this virus to be embedded in the mindset of the researchers. These linkages are reflected in a proposed framework that focuses on the traceability of the virus and its related symptoms. Also, we study the virus ‘doubling time’ and the Case Fatality Rate (CFR). The target of this work is to prepare the world for the coming future foresighted challenges by bringing scientists together to see the COVID-19 complexity and solutions from different perspectives that would bring more holistic breakthroughs.

2.0 Literature Review

2.1 Reviewing the Events of the Coronavirus (in first three months).

The complexity of zoonotic viruses’ outbreaks is increasing in both their capacity to cause severe infections, epidemics that goes to be global and become pandemics, besides creating disruptions to human quality of life and socio-economic status. These Zoonoses diseases and infections naturally transmitted between people and animals. These zoonotic nature outbreaks come in three forms: endemic zoonoses that make the virus present in many places and affect many people and animals, epidemic zoonoses which are sporadic in temporal and spatial distribution; and emerging and re-emerging zoonoses which are newly appearing in a population or have existed previously but are rapidly increasing in incidence or geographical range, as per WHO (2019). So far, almost all the solutions offered in literature been coming from one main discipline, medicine.

Before the outbreak of the COVID-19, the world had different chances to bring resilient solutions to such outbreaks when it faced Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Swine Flu H1N1 2009, Yellow fever, Avian Influenza (H5N1) and (H7N9), West Nile virus and the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), but it didn’t. There is great similarity between all of these viruses that could bring a hint to their both complexity and resilient solutions. This latest version of coronavirus, for example, has a great similarity with (SARS) which occurred in 2002-2003. However, the SARS is thought to have originated in bats, the virus jumped to humans, becoming a global epidemic across 37 countries before contained through infection control practices.

In analogy to SARS, the COVID-19 series of incidence started on December 31st, 2019. The Chinese health officials detected a new strain of the coronavirus in a Wuhan food market. The Huanan Seafood Market sold wild and exotic animals less than a mile from the Hankou train station through which at 100,000 passengers flowed each day. On January 1st, Chinese authorities closed the market. On January 9th, Chinese researchers identified a new strain of the coronavirus. In the same month, 41% of the identified patients in Wuhan, infected other patients or other care providers.

On January 30th, World Health Organization Director Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared a public health emergency. By February, Beijing authorities claimed to have locked down 50 million Chinese in order to contain outbreaks. This started to affect the supplies to and from China. It is estimated more than one-third of China’s manufacturing and services are affected. This began to escalate to many countries and organisations where their sales, income and growth dependent on Chinese supplies. WHO (2020b)

Several news accounts report companies and medical researchers rushing into action. To meet the demand, a number of firms are increasing the production of protective masks and suits. Researchers collaborated across global networks to develop an anti-virus.

2.2 COVID-19 as a Zoonotic Problem

The virus is known as COVID-19 — short for Coronavirus disease 2019 — and it has spread around the world, infecting more than 89,000 people and killing more than 3,000 till the moment of writing This chapter. The “Coronavirus” comes from a class of viruses, which the latest outbreak was seen in SARS. It is also from similar family as the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) of 2012 and 2014-2017, which may have started in camels and spread to humans. These viruses have a crown-like shape with a spike of proteins on top. They carry mostly the same symptoms including fever, coughing and shortness of breath, on a level much more serious than that seen in cold sufferers. But, in COVID-19, these...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One
• Section One
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Section Two
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Part Two
• Section Three
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• Chapter Eighteen
• Section Four
• Chapter Nineteen
• Chapter Twenty
• Chapter Twenty- One
• Chapter Twenty-Two
• Chapter Twenty-Three
• Chapter Twenty-Four
• Conclusion
• List of Multidisciplinary Authors
• Keywords
• Abbreviations
• Brief of IIEP
• Brief about the Editors
• Endnotes