Rio Scarcelli, Editor in Chief

     The Coronavirus, or COVID-19, entered Pennsylvania on March 6.  The state has been taking vast preventative measures with shutting down all nonessential businesses, college campuses and even all public schools like Penn-Trafford.

     On March 13, Governor Tom Wolf issued the statewide mandate that all public schools were to be closed for 10 business days, or two weeks, under a state of emergency due to the rise of COVID-19. 

     Three weeks after cases being announced in Pennsylvania, the pandemic arrived near the P-T area with two confirmed cases in Westmoreland County.  

     With numerous precautions taken to keep the people safe, residents of the state should take the guidelines of quarantine as seriously as they can in order to keep themselves and those around them as healthy as possible.  

     Much of the inability to treat the quarantine seriously is the lack of knowledge surrounding what outbreak is.  By staying informed about the virus, its tendencies and where it has spread to, it becomes much easier to stay out of harm’s way.  

     The Coronavirus is a respiratory illness that can be spread most commonly through proximity or respiratory droplets.  The most common cases have been spread when people come within six feet of one another or by coughing and sneezing the ingested virus.  

     While most cases have been seen through person-to-person transmission, some surfaces like steel or plastic can host COVID-19 for as long as three days without being sanitized.  

          The CDC (Center for Disease Control) stated the virus spreads very easily and fosters itself the most with “community spreads.”  Most cases in the United States have been found in larger cities where residents do not know where they got the virus from.  

     Because Coronavirus is the most acclimated in crowded areas, it only makes sense that isolating oneself would substantially lessen the susceptibility of getting and spreading the virus.  

     If people in the community had kept up with the statistics surrounding the spread of COVID-19, they would know that it is in an accelerated stage of transmission as the disease is relatively new to the country.  

     Some, however, ignore that fact given the lethality rates of the virus and the demographic that is of the most concern.  

     The CDC reported that eight out of 10 people who contracted and died from Coronavirus were of the age 65 or above.  This information has caused some of the younger demographics of people to not take the initiative of properly isolating themselves from others.  

     Locally, some P-T teens and other young adults have been seen online ignoring the warnings of limited social gatherings and contact outside of one’s house because they feel that the illness “will not affect them.”  

     Even if the disease may have less chance of affecting them personally, the possibility of affecting someone they love is much more plausible.  

     Not only does the COVID-19 target older populations, but it also becomes more susceptible to those with asthma, history of heart disease, respiratory illnesses and pregnancies.  

     New studies by the University of Hong Kong, one of leading members in tracking the disease, suggest that the fatality rates were lower than most people thought with age demographics of 15-44 being as low as 0.5 percent and those 64 and above peaking at 4.7 percent.

     Younger individuals may take the fatality rate of 0.5 percent too close to heart when it comes to protecting those that they love: especially those that hold higher risk of dying from the virus.  

    The news has culminated in mass amounts of hysteria across the nation.   Acting out of the regiment of quarantine may be seen as people “rebelling” against how grave the media has made the illness out to be, yet the precautions being put in place show that it is better to be safe than sorry. 

     With the virus being relatively new, the CDC notes that COVID-19 is only in its beginning stages of clinical research as it is a rapidly evolving situation.  This means that some of the informational outbreaks that come every day could be starkly positive or negative.  

     Keeping all of that in mind, the best way to keep people and their communities safe is to properly carry out the sentiments of quarantine, even if they do not feel personally threatened by the virus.  

     This will allow for people to calmly digest the situation and how it has altered their day-to-day lives as doctors heavily prioritize the research dedicated to the Coronavirus and finding out ways to lessen or entirely eliminate the symptoms.  

     If people felt that the fatality levels were low enough for the virus, social distancing, or “flattening the curve,” would only do better in decreasing that rate.  

     In a time of large changes and confusion, the best thing that can be done to curb that is to stay informed and make as educated decisions as possible to keep an individual’s health and those around them in mind.  Even if it is not optimal, people should do their best to stick to the rules of quarantine to keep their communities safe.