The students in Dr. Jacobs’s sophomore Modern World History class at Harpeth Hall built this page to share what we’ve learned about COVID-19.
We started our investigation by participating in an online course, “When a Virus Goes Viral,” through Global Online Academy.
Building on that experience, we followed news about COVID-19 for two weeks, and then began compiling what we learned to share with our community.
The final part of the project (currently still in the works) will compare the COVID-19 epidemic to other major disease outbreaks/epidemics in modern history. Our points of comparison are: HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and influenza.
Created using Piktochart.
Our Questions
We started our investigation by compiling a list of questions that the class wanted to answer:
- What does the name “coronavirus” mean?
- How did the virus start? Where did it come from? Did it come from an animal?
- What are the symptoms? How long does it take for symptoms to develop?
- How is it spread? What conditions are conducive to the spread of the virus? How contagious is it?
- Are certain people more prone to infection? Is anyone immune?
- What does the quarantine environment look like?
- What is the death/survival rate? Is it more deadly in some parts of the world?
- How long will it take to find an effective treatment or vaccine?
- What is the best way to contain it without creating panic?
Questions for Comparative Study
We also developed a list of questions to guide our research as we study HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and Influenza:
- What do we know about this virus/disease?
- What are the symptoms of infection? How is infection diagnosed?
- How does the virus spread/how is it contracted?
- What is the mortality rate? Has this changed over time? Does it differ depending on age, sex, or other factors?
- How can it best be avoided?
- What treatments for the disease are available? How has this changed over time?
- When/where did the first cases appear?
- What major outbreaks have there been? When/where did these occur?
- What was the initial government response where the outbreak occurred?
- What was the international response to the outbreak (WHO, etc.)?
- How did the US government respond to the outbreak(s)?
- How was the outbreak handled in the media (local, international, US)?
- How has media treatment of the disease changed over time?
- What issues of stigmatization and/or discrimination arose as a result of the outbreak? What has been or could be done about this?
- What is the status of the disease now? What is the current infection rate?
- What is being done to prepare for future outbreaks?
- What advances have been made since the initial outbreak of this disease?
