COVID-19 and Its Impact on Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder
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COVID-19 and Its Impact on Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder Ismail El Hailouch School of Public Health, Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA
Description of COVID-19 Coronaviruses (CoVs) are a group of diverse, enveloped, positive-sense, sing-stranded RNA viruses belonging to the subfamily Orthocoronavirinae in the family Coronaviridae, Order Nidovirales (Li et al. 2020). CoVs are known to cause disease in humans and animals, and can affect nervous, respiratory, hepatic, and enteric systems. In December 2019, patients in Wuhan, China, presented with pneumonia of unknown cause. It was determined after genome sequencing that the pneumonia – termed coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) – was caused by a novel CoV, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) (Xu et al. 2020). Symptoms of the disease include mild to moderate respiratory illness, fever, and loss of smell.
Current Knowledge State of Emergency On January 20, 2020, the WHO declared COVID19 a public health emergency, and eventually declared it a pandemic on March 11, 2020 (Dhama et al. 2020). This marked the first pandemic since the 2009 outbreak of H1N1. Initially, the majority of the public health burden associated with COVID-19 was confined mostly to China. However, the disease quickly spread to Europe and the United States of America (USA). The European countries that were affected most severely are Italy and Spain, but the USA has the largest number of confirmed cases and deaths due to COVID-19. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in stringent lockdown measures being implemented worldwide, and has caused severe economic losses due to sudden disruptions in production and trade. Unfortunately, most of the governmental measures implemented worldwide have been reactive rather than proactive, and were not implemented early enough to minimize societal disruptions. COVID-19 Effects on Mental Health Many governments worldwide have adopted similar measures to combat COVID-19. These measures typically involve some level of lockdown, wearing masks, quarantining if necessary, and limiting social gatherings. While these measures have proven effective at slowing the spread of COVID-19, they have had a particularly negative
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 F. R. Volkmar (ed.), Encyclopedia of Autism Spectrum Disorders, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6435-8_102543-1
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COVID-19 and Its Impact on Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder
impact on regional and global economies (Adhikari et al. 2019). Additionally, these stringent public health measures have caused adverse psychological impacts on the general population. Studies show that negative psychological effects of the COVID-19 pandemic result from the unpredictability, uncertainty, misinformation, and social isolation surrounding the situation (Zandifar and Badrfam 2020). Vulnerable populations are especially at risk of developing adverse psychological symptoms due to the increased level of stress and panic caus
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