Covid-19-Coronavirus-News-Articles

It's 2 a.m. on a chilly mid-March morning and I am tossing and turning on the sofa in the living room of my small Harlem apartment in New York, hoping I'm not disturbing Greg, my husband, peacefully sleeping in our adjacent bedroom. Unbearable aches accompany my fever, which just jumped from low grade to 102° and persistent chills now violently shake my body. The past three days I've been lethargic and a little achy but I chalked those complaints up to jet lag. I had just returned from a two-week Scandinavia trip for work. Tonight, with the arrival of these new dreadful symptoms, I'm suddenly fearing the worst: thoughts of the coronavirus flood my mind.

As a writer, I travel the globe for a living, logging thousands of miles per year. It may sound glamorous, and it can be, but it's also a lot of trains, planes, automobiles, new people, foreign customs, crowds and interviewing sources close up for stories. It hadn't seemed like a risky business until now — the numbers of dead and dying climbing. It's a sleepless night consumed with worry.

The much hoped-for herd immunity against the novel coronavirus is unlikely to occur in many places around the world until the end of 2021, an official with the World Health Organization said this week when warning the next few months will be "critical."

"We are going to approach the beginning of the end, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel," Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the WHO’s chief scientist, told CNBC on Wednesday. "However, there’s still a tunnel we have to go through, and the next few months are going to be very critical."

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread with alarming speed, infecting millions and bringing economic activity to a near-standstill as countries imposed tight restrictions on movement to halt the spread of the virus. As the health and human toll grows, the economic damage is already evident and represents the largest economic shock the world has experienced in decades.

The June 2020 Global Economic Prospects describes both the immediate and near-term outlook for the impact of the pandemic and the long-term damage it has dealt to prospects for growth. The baseline forecast envisions a 5.2 percent contraction in global GDP in 2020, using market exchange rate weights—the deepest global recession in decades, despite the extraordinary efforts of governments to counter the downturn with fiscal and monetary policy support. Over the longer horizon, the deep recessions triggered by the pandemic are expected to leave lasting scars through lower investment, an erosion of human capital through lost work and schooling, and fragmentation of global trade and supply linkages.

• People who have recovered from COVID-19 are sharing their unusual experiences online.
• Because so many people with an infection are asymptomatic, it can disrupt the feeling of being safe.
• More people are reporting experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety now than this time last year, or even 6 months ago. That can be from having COVID-19, being exposed to the virus, or simply living through a panders