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Task

The COVID-19 Pandemic in English- Speaking Countries

COVID-19 is a contagious disease caused by coronavirus 2. The first case was identified in Wuhan, China in December 2019. From there, the disease spread worldwide, becoming a pandemic. In this task, you will be asked to compare how two English-speaking countries have responded to the pandemic.
Photo: We see a sidewalk and a building. The building has a grafitti of a nurse in protective clothing. She is holding up a closed fist. The Spanish word VIDA (life) is written on the fingers of her blue plastic glove.
COVID-19 affected people all over the world. Image: Daniel Capilla, Juan María Rivero (Bohemio) / CC BY-SA 4.0
What is a pandemic?

A pandemic is when an infectious disease spreads across a large region, for example several continents or worldwide, and infects a lot of people.

Famous examples of pandemics are the Black Death (1346–1353) and the Spanish Flu (1918–1920).

Research:

Work in groups.

  1. Research. Share your findings with the rest of the class.

  2. Choose two English speaking countries and study their response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Find out:

  • how quickly the government put measures in place to stop the spread of the illness.

  • what measures were taken.

  • how efficient these measures were.

  • how long the country kept measures in place.

  • how ordinary people reacted to the measures.

  • how the leader of the executive branch in the country spoke about the disease early on in the spread of the pandemic, and whether their position changed over time.

  • whether the pandemic had consequences for the political leadership of the country. Was there, for example, a change of government as a consequence of the pandemic?

  • how well the health sector of the country handled the pandemic.

  • how many deaths there were from COVID-19 in the country.

  • what financial consequences the pandemic had for the country. Was there, for example, increased poverty or slowed economic growth?

When you have found the information, compare the two countries, and discuss whether one had a more efficient response to the pandemic than the other.

If you find that one country had a more efficient response, try to find out why: Was this because of political factors, geographical factors, a better health care system ...?

Why do we write COVID-19 and not Covid-19?

COVID-19 is an acronym, which is an abbreviation consisting of the first letters of each of the words it is an abbreviation of. An acronym is pronounced as if it is a word. Examples of acronyms are NASA and UNICEF.

COVID-19 is an acronym of the coronavirus disease of 2019.

You will sometimes see COVID-19 written as Covid-19; that is because the media often writes acronyms that are said as words with just an initial capital letter. Abbreviations that are said as individual letters, for example the CIA or the BBC, are written with capital letters.

A doctor or researcher would write COVID-19 with capital letters as this is the norm for scientific texts.

In school, we try to use academic language and we have therefore chosen to write COVID-19.

Discuss:

Have a class discussion.

  1. Was the English-speaking world's response to the COVID-19 pandemic as efficient as it could be, taken the circumstances into consideration?

  2. What can the world do to respond more efficiently to future pandemics?

Write:

What was the COVID-19 pandemic like for you? Write a text where you draw on your own experiences. Choose a suitable genre e.g. speech, short story, article, blog...