The world has seen many pandemics; however, COVID-19 provoked global emergencies at an unprecedented scale in all aspects of life. Despite of recent advances in learning management systems and online education tools, one of the worst disruptions experienced was in the delivery of education. To keep students safe, most educational institutions were closed at the onset of the pandemic. At the peak of the crisis, ~90% of learners worldwide had their education disrupted. The policies were based on social distancing and the use of personal protection. However, the negative impacts of long-term isolation were not articulated. It is likely that there may be similar emergencies in the future. How can we use exponential technologies and innovations for the effective delivery of education? Guided by the lessons learned from the impact of school closures, assessment of remote learning, and the fact that education delivery should be continuous, the authors explore how different research perspectives and evidence gathered can help strengthen policy reflections and future planning for improving efficiency.
TopIntroduction
Around December 2019, a novel coronavirus disease emerged in Wuhan, Hubei province, China (Zhou et al. 2020; Cheng and Shan 2020; Wu and McGoogan 2020). A cluster of patients with severe respiratory illnesses, such as viral pneumonia and lung failure, were observed around that time in that region. The causal agent, unidentified at that time, has since been named the “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Novel Coronavirus” - (SARS-nCoV-2) virus or simply COVID-19, being originated in the year 2019. While initially, there were few reports that person-to-person transmission was occurring, it became clearly evident that transmission from asymptomatic individuals to others was observed to be quite likely (Pan et al. 2020; Bai et al. 2020; Rothe et al. 2020). Due to high transmissivity, the SARS-nCoV-2 (or COVID-19) disease disseminated rapidly regionally and across the borders of many nations in less than six months from its first discovery and led to its global spread in 2020 (Holshue et al. 2020; Lee et al. 2020; Huang et al. 2020; Burke et al. 2020). Immediately, COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020 (WHO 2020), causing many countries to ban flights from, initially, China but later from many other countries, as well. The causal agent, SARS-CoV-2, was initially confirmed via genome analysis to be a close relative of zoonotic coronaviruses and of a prior outbreak strain, SARS-CoV, which triggered an earlier epidemic in 2003. Clinical observations of SARS-CoV-2 infections normally manifested themselves as respiratory syndromes, although there is a degree of intestinal involvement, and the most severe symptoms were interstitial pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) (Hamming et al 2004; Lamers et al. 2020).
Early in the outbreak, the taxonomy and language employed were not finalized, and hence “Novel Coronavirus”, “2019-nCOV”, SARS-nCoV-2, and sometimes “COVID-19” were used interchangeably to describe the virus, that is, now known as SARS-nCOV-2 or simply COVID-19. For the purposes of discussion here, we will designate the recent coronavirus disease as COVID-19 and will define it for any number of coronavirus viral strains that may cause it. The COVID-19 syndrome is to be considered associated with the critical complication, interstitial pneumonia associated with ARDS at varying rates, with ARDS being considered a major driver in mortality and morbidity. Due to the immense spread of COVID-19 in the first year of its first observation in Wuhan, the pandemic resulted in enormous human casualties and caused serious social, economic, educational, and productivity losses. Large field hospitals were seen under construction to house many incoming patients. Due to its fast spread, many organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), John Hopkins University (JHU) Medical Center, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), and many others started websites for tracking patients and associated information, such as age, co-morbidity factors, race, gender, etc. to discern evolving trends. Figure 1(a) and (b) show confirmed cased of COVID-19 in (a) and confirmed deaths in (b) for the period between Jan 1, 2020 – Jan 1, 2023. The data is available at OurWorldInData.org (Mathieu, E. et al, 2020). Although data is available for almost all countries, the data is shown for China, India, North and South Americas, Africa, Asia, and its comparison to the entire world. The data shown below indicates measures against 7-day rolling average counts of confirmed cases and deaths reported.
Figure 1. COVID-19: (a): Confirmed cases and (b): Confirmed deaths between Jan 1, 2020 – Jan 1, 2023 (using data from OurWorldInData.org)