The Corona Project

The corona project was the last oral assessment in International English this year, and I certainly learned a lot from it too. The main thing I got from this project is that it’s important to be critical to everything you read online. Even though its reliable statistics, it might not show the whole picture or story.

When I started this project, I was really unsure about which countries to choose. I originally wanted to compare two countries with very different statistics to present a good and a bad way to handle a pandemic. So that in the end, I could show you a country that we all should follow if this ever happened again. Spain was one of the countries that quickly caught my eye, as my grandmother had some interesting stories when I talked to her on the phone when the pandemic had just arrived in the country for real. Therefore, it became clear that I wanted Spain to be one of my two countries. Later on, I had a discussion with my family about the corona situation. At that point, I had already come across Mexico’s numbers. I then issued this to my parents, and they encouraged me to find out why and to choose Mexico as my second country. So that’s what I did. And I certainly didn’t expect the outcome.

We started the project by finding three reliable sources for each country. I googled questions I thought were relevant and got a lot of results. I chose mostly statistic sights, and online newspapers. I checked who wrote the different articles and doubled checked their sources to make sure I got good and correct information. After finding suitable sources I started going through the information and choosing relevant quotes and statistics. I tried to mainly read up on the subjects and just write down quotes and numbers so that my presentation is mostly my own words.

My main focus, or my thesis question, was pretty clear from the beginning. I wanted to find out why the statistics of Mexico and Spain were so different, even though they have the same social culture. It was the end result or what I thought my conclusion was going to be that changed drastically throughout the process. With having a thesis question from the beginning, it was rather easy to structure the presentation. I knew I wanted to talk about the corona pandemic at the beginning, and from there go more in debt in the two countries, and then ending with a conclusion.  

In the assignment, we were also going to have two interviews with one person from each country. As I mentioned, it became clear quite early on that I wanted to include my grandmothers experience in the project. She had already talked a lot about it, and I really wanted to show how it was for the elderly, who has clearly been hit the hardest by this pandemic. The actual interview went really well, she had a lot to say so I did have to shorten it down, but in all, I think it turned out alright.

Mexico, however, was a bit harder. I struggled a lot to find someone to interview from the country. At some point, I had to move on and work on other parts of the presentation. Therefore, I had to leave the idea of finding someone from Mexico to interview. Instead, I chose to include several quotes from leaders, trying to create the same illusion. It would be really interesting to get an interview with a local just to get an inside story, and to check if my conclusion adds up. However, unfortunately, it didn’t work out like that, and I don’t think it made that huge of a difference. In the end, I was really happy with the way the interview part turned out.

Some of the information I found during this project was that Mexico, with a population of 120 million people, had a lot fewer cases of corona than Spain, who only has 45 million inhabitants. With both counties having the same social culture this sounded a bit weird to me. I got all of this information from reliable sources, however, during this project I also found out that you cant always trust statistics. No matter how reliable they are, they don't always show the whole picture. Over half of Mexico's population lives in poverty, which means they probably won't have the money and resources to go to the hospital and get tested. Therefore I do believe that there's a lot of dark numbers when it comes to cases of corona in Mexico. This ended up being my conclusion as well, that Mexico hasn't been lucky or reacted perfectly to the pandemic. It's just the fact that the statistics might not cover the poorer half of the population. And with a population of 120 million, that's a lot of dark numbers. 

In all, I’m very happy with how my corona project turned out. Next time I would definitely try to find an interview from both sides because I think it would be extra interesting to hear from Mexico more personal. However, we didn’t have all the time in the world, so it would have to do without. Though it ended really differently from what I originally thought, I found it extra interesting to investigate. I really liked the assignment and enjoyed working on it. I also think that’s one of the reasons why it went so well. When I find the projects interesting to work on, the end results are always much better too.

Elise Brodahl