Wherever you live in the world today, unless you are one of the 5 million people who live in New Zealand, you are feeling the effects of COVID-19. I am not saying you are actually infected physically but you are likely to know somebody or someone who knows someone who has been ill or possibly even died recently as a result of COVID-19. This knowledge alone has an impact on your mental state and your body’s physiology.
We are living in unprecedented times through a pandemic which is the worst to hit the planet since the Spanish Flu of 1918. During the influenza pandemic of 1918, which was caused by an H1N1 virus, about 500 million people were infected with roughly 50 million deaths. Death rates were particularly high in children under the age of five and healthy adults between the ages of 20-40. If this pandemic was to have happened in today’s times, we would have been better equipped to deal with the secondary effects of infections and would have had better control methods for isolation and personal hygiene. (more…)