By Dr. Afriyie Randall
WKTV Community Contributor

News programs and other media often toss out words to describe the current COVID-19 situation such as pandemic and epidemic.

It is easy to confuse epidemic and pandemic as the words are used to define outbreaks and both have “demic” in them.

What is the difference?

An epidemic is a disease that effects many people in a specific population, community, and/or region at the same time. The disease spreads from person to person and is new to the area such as the Polio epidemic of 1916 and 1952. 

Pandemic is an epidemic that spreads over a larger area such as a country or a continent.

The key difference between the two is scale. 

The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. On March 13, 2020, a national emergency was declared concerning the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States.

For more information about epidemic or pandemic, visit the Centers for Disease Control’s website, cdc.org.