COVID and Counseling: A Shift to Telehealth During a Global Crisis

Background

The COVID-19 virus, first detected in Wuhan, China in 2019, was declared a public international health emergency on January 30^th, 2020, and a pandemic on March 11, 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO) (Almeda et al., 2021; Lee et al., 2021). Spreading to other countries in the early months of 2020, the virus has impacted the lives of citizens around the globe. COVID-19 has taken the lives of millions, and has impacted economies worldwide (Almeda et al., 2021; Lee et al., 2021). Considered the greatest public health crisis of the century, the world has not experienced an illness that has been so deadly and transmissible in such a short period of time since the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 (Sanders et al., 2020). As COVID-19 is a newly emerging virus and treatments are being created rapidly, until mass vaccination and better life-saving treatments are accessible to all who need it, many will continue to become ill with the potentially fatal virus. Until these life-saving prevention measures and treatments are available to all, the WHO and local governmental public health agencies’ only strategies to help contain the spread of the virus has included hand-washing, social distancing, and mask-wearing. According to the Centers for Disease Control, these measures have been implemented at least to some extent, by governments world-wide (2020).

Since the DNA for a vaccine was sequenced in January of 2020 (WHO, 2020) Scientists have raced to create and test vaccines to prevent severe COVID illness. As of December, 2020 vaccines were approved in the United States by the Food Drug Administration (FDA), as they have been proven efficacious to prevent severe illness and death from COVID-19 (FDA, 2020). Since the first report of a cluster of cases of COVID-19 on December 31, 2019 (WHO, 2020) until December of 2020,the virus has spread all over the world, infecting over 104,600,000 million people, and taking the lives of over 2, 274,000 people (453,545 deaths in the United States) as of February, 4, 2021 (Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE), 2021). In addition, many governments have closed their borders, implemented mandatory “stay at home” orders, and have utilized governmental authority to temporarily close businesses, and limit capacity of local establishments such as work-places, schools, restaurants, bars and other public establishments. Furthermore, supply chains have been disrupted due to governmental closures and viral outbreaks at production facilities that have led to quarantines that pause production (McKibben, 2020).

These disruptions have impacted the global economy in devastating ways. In addition to the physical threat of illness, people have been greatly impacted by financial hardship, and the loss of employment. As a solution, many businesses and entire industries have moved to online platforms, and many businesses with the ability to do so, have sent their employees to work from home. While many industries had an online presence before the pandemic, some have shifted almost entirely to online platforms. Businesses have started using video conferencing for meetings, and to provide services to people that were previously “face-to-face.” Teachers, doctors and mental health professionals have largely switched exclusively to video conferencing to provide services to clients in order to decrease the transmission of COVID-19 in attempts to keep themselves and their clients safe and healthy.