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IT/Science

COVID-19 and the Vaccines

30701 Kang, Sun-ae

Since the first confirmed COVID-19 case appeared in Korea
in January of 2020, there have been fifteen thousand confirmed
COVID-19 patients and three hundred dead as of August 17th. Due
to COVID-19, most students have not been able to go to school and
have gone through online schooling, and adults are still working from
home. Furthermore, the number of confirmed cases has been steadily
increasing with time. People of the world have to think about how we
can fight COVID-19 to reduce the damage it will cause.
As the saying goes, “Know your enemy and yourself.” In order
to fight COVID-19, we need to know details about it first. First, the
COVID-19 virus first occurred in Wuhan, China, and the incubation
period is from one to fourteen days. With no vaccine or sure
treatment, it has a global fatality rate of about 3.5 percent. Symptoms
include fever, sore throat, and headaches, and as far as we know,
the virus is known to spread through exhaled droplets and contact.
The COVID-19 pathogen is an RNA virus, a type of virus similar
to SARS and MERS, officially known as SARS-CoV-2: COVID-19
viridae. It has been infecting humans and causing severe pneumonia.
RNA is a nucleic acids that serves to interpret DNA and then pass
on the information that is interpreted to ribosomes so they can make
proteins. The important point here is that RNA, unlike DNA, does not
have the ability to modify genetic information. If genetic information
cannot be modified, there is a higher chance of mutations occurring.
In fact, RNA viruses are known to be one hundred thousand to one
million times more likely to mutate than DNA viruses. Such mutations
make it very difficult to develop effective vaccines.
So when will a vaccine be developed, and how can we prevent the
virus from spreading? Before we can understand the timing of the
vaccine development, we should first find out how the new vaccine

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