With the recent COVID‐19 outbreak, many children around the globe are experiencing an unfamiliar situation: instead of spending days in the kindergarten and playing with their friends, they now accompany their parents who are working from home. As a result, children may be asking a number of questions trying to understand why we all stay at home and what do the news about coronavirus that we read and follow every day mean.
We feature drawings of a five‐year‐old girl depicting her comprehension of COVID‐19. This girl asked many questions, to name just a few: What is a virus? Can you show me a picture? Why do viruses have different shapes? How does a virus make one sick? Why can't we travel? Fortunately, the Internet can help find answers to many of these questions, since a number of images and videos are available and adapted for every age. The images below show how this five‐year‐old understood the new circumstances after her parents’ explanation of what viruses are and how the disease spreads. While it remains a mystery why a bacteriophage appears to be sad; there seem to be two types of coronaviruses – the green ‘’happy face’’ virus (Fig. 1A), and the red ‘’angry face’’ coronavirus (Fig. 1A), which is contagious and causes COVID‐19, eliciting symptoms such as fever and cough (Fig. 1B).
Figure 1.
Five‐year‐old's depiction of COVID‐19 onset and symptoms. (A) Image depicts various types of viruses: a ‘’happy’’ virus (green), a crying bacteriophage (blue) and a dangerous coronavirus (red). (B) This image depicts the virus spread and shows some of COVID‐19 symptoms. Green colour represents a healthy condition, whereas red refers to COVID‐19 infected people from asymptomatic to getting ill. Lower left corner shows a sick individual (red, sad smiley face) cohabiting with a healthy individual (green, happy smiley face) leading to disease spread and development of symptoms such as fever (thermometer with a red scale) and cough (coughing smiley face). Drawings are courtesy of five‐year‐old Iva published with permission of her parents.