In the first 21 years of the 21st century, humanity has experienced six major multinational epidemics. The agents involved were severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), influenza A(H1N1) virus, Ebola virus, Zika virus, and SARS-CoV-2 (Focosi et al., 2022).
WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak as a global pandemic with exponential spread worldwide (Naqvi et al., 2022).
SARS-CoV-2 infection is benign in most individuals but, in around 10% of cases, it triggers hypoxaemic COVID-19 pneumonia, which leads to critical illness in around 3% of cases. The ensuing risk of death doubles every five years from childhood onwards and is around 1.5 times greater in men than in women (Zhang et al., 2022 a).
Breakthrough infections caused by the variants confirm that high vaccine coverage may not guarantee effective control of the spread of COVID-19 (Zhang et al., 2022 b). In other words, vaccination is not the only reliable way to control the pandemic, as the implementation of epidemic prevention and control measures cannot be ignored. Continuously disseminating educational propaganda to the public for them to take correct preventive behaviors such as maintaining social distance and proper hygiene habits is essential for epidemic prevention and control (Luo et al., 2022).
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