It has been almost two months since the first stay at home orders were put in place in the United States. Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, governments around the world have shut down entire economies in order to protect the health of their citizens. The United States now has over one million cases and more than 50,000 deaths, with numbers still rising. The rippling effects of COVID-19 have shaken almost every form of industry.

What I would like to focus on is our connection with nature, how nature can benefit us, and how we might use that during this pandemic.

 Music, often described as organized sound, plays an incredibly important role in our lives. It allows us to feel emotion and express ourselves as well. Music allows individuals to come together who listen or play the same music and create a collective. It helps shape musical communities and ideologies.

Today our world is controlled by the COVID-19 pandemic, and we seem unable to defend ourselves against the attack of the virus. However, as is the case with all viruses, general immunity proves to be a great asset in prevention of infection and dealing with its onset. According to Dr. Gombart, acute respiratory tract infections were responsible for the deaths of 2.5 million worldwide annually, even before this pandemic. A great deal of research indicates that many of these cases could have been mitigated with improved immune function as a result of proper nutrition. Dr.

If I’m being honest, most of my life has been spent in front of a TV or computer screen. Playing video games has been something that has been my greatest double-edged sword: providing my greatest sense of comfort and entertainment, while also being one of my greatest hindrances due to the excessive amounts of time I have sunken into it. Throughout the last few decades have completely changed at nearly every level since its inception with Pong in the 70s.

There are many different types of therapies including visual art, music and dance therapy have been used to stimulate the minds of individuals who are in the early stages of dementia. Participating in art therapy motivates patients to interact through nonverbal means of communication.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE-cA4UK07c

Video 1: The big lesson from South Korea’s coronavirus response (Source: Vox)

The sound of a ventilator, courtesy of Youtube, 2016

With each week, I have been exposed to a variety of different perspectives relating to the outbreak at hand via the Honors 177 blog posts, a welcomed break from the constant stream of COVID-19 updates. It is for this reason that I would like to turn my attention to the solution, in other words, what will be involved in ending the outbreak: antibodies.

In my childhood, one of my favorite TV channels was Jetix. Frequently after school, I would rush to TV to see many vibrant super-hero cartoons, where characters were able to fly, climb on walls without any harness, turn invisible, heal without any medicine, and perform many other "magic" feats. After episodes with new heroes with their new amazing capabilities were introduced, my friends and I would argue endlessly on which super-power was "cooler" to have.

The media frenzy surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic has been dominated by jargon that has become all-too-familiar: flattening the curve, social distancing, herd immunity, and vaccination development. As the conversation has shifted as the pandemic has progressed, something that has been on the minds of forward-thinking scientists and social activists alike has been vaccine availability.

While being quarantined in my home, my mom was cleaning out some old books from our attic when she happened to come upon a book called, “A Journal of the Plague Year” by Daniel DeFore (Figure 1). It was a relatively new book, but was written in 1665. At the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic, this seemed so ironic and almost hilarious that we should find this book. Now, as the virus has fully infiltrated our lives and changed our entire worlds, the book feels a little heavier.

Fungi are considered to be one of the major taxonomic kingdoms of biology. Prior to this classification, fungi have long confused biologists for their strange characteristics that resemble both plants and animals (What Are Fungi?). Most commonly, fungi are associated with death, since they serve the role of a decomposer in our ecosystem, breaking down organic material.

In the wake of COVID-19, the dissemination of public knowledge regarding all aspects of the pandemic became essential. Luckily, in the age of technological innovation, facts about the virus are being released everyday. Artistic simulations, models, and other media allow audiences to experience and visualize features of the virus, and thus understand it on a more fundamental level.

As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to spread throughout the country and the rest of the world, citizens have become anxious about when and how we will see a return to normalcy. Scientists and health experts agree however, that in order to get to the pre-COVID normalcy that we yearn for, there will need to be some sort of vaccine or therapeutic drug that puts the virus away for good (Stump, 2020).