thumb|300px|Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, [[convention centers (pictured here) were deemed to be ideal sites for temporary hospitals, due to their existing infrastructure (electrical, water, sewage). Hotels and dormitories were also considered appropriate because they can use negative pressure technology.]]
A pandemic is a disease outbreak that spreads across multiple countries or regions, affecting large numbers of people. It matters because pandemics can overwhelm existing healthcare infrastructure, requiring creative solutions like converting convention centers into temporary hospitals to handle the surge of patients.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
thumb|300px|Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, [[convention centers (pictured here) were deemed to be ideal sites for temporary hospitals, due to their existing infrastructure (electrical, water, sewage). Hotels and dormitories were also considered appropriate because they can use negative pressure technology.]]
A pandemic ( ) is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has a sudden increase in cases and spreads across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial portion of the human population. Widespread endemic diseases with a stable number of infected individuals such as recurrences of seasonal influenza are generally excluded as they occur simultaneously in large regions of the globe rather than being spread worldwide.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).