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[PART 4]
“When assessing the severity of a novel hazard, such as pandemic COVID-19, unknown characteristics such as long-term consequences, vulnerabilities, uncertainties, and hazard characteristics must be anticipated in the risk assessment process”
Hazard Severity and Risk Assessment The thrust of this editorial centers from an all-hazards perspective: the source of the biological hazard must be well understood to initiate the most effective prevention, containment, and mitigation strategies, especially regarding public health outreach messaging and associated recommended PPE. From an all-hazards perspective, the greatest separation between SARS-CoV-2 and H1N1is knowledge and vaccination capacity (CDC, n.d.), while acknowledging much knowledge regarding H1N1 but little regarding SARSCoV-2. Aside from the obvious unavailability of a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, it is possible that multiple strains can present with different sets of epidemiological factors (Tan et al., 2020; Tang et al., 2020). Our forthcoming articles state that the Zika virus brought microcephaly in human babies, human sexual transmission, and adult onset of neurological symptoms into the severity calculus, and that previously held understandings of West Nile virus-impacted human age spectrum was broader than previously believed (Eddy & Sase, 2020). When assessing the severity of a novel hazard, such as pandemic COVID-19, unknown characteristics such as long-term consequences…
