Something for a lay person about COVID – 19.

As confirmed cases of COVID-19 near 1 milllion worldwide, there are lots of scientific developments coming up such as, coronavirus survivors’ plasma having potential to save lives, loss of taste and smell being an important symptom for COVID – 19 even though it hasn’t yet been added to WHO’s COVID-19 symptom list, and the jury on whether COVID-19 is airborne or not. Coronavirus has an incubation period of 2-14 days. The most common symptoms of COVID-19 on the WHO symptom list are dry cough, tiredness and fever. However, some people may develop more severe forms of the disease such as pneumonia and “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome” a.k.a. “SARS” or “Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome” also called “ARDS”. In these severe cases fluids can leak into the lungs collecting in air sacs and making it difficult for the lungs to transfer oxygen from the air to the blood. This is when people are put on respirators to help with breathing by delivering oxygen to the lungs via high-flow oxygen therapy or mechanical ventilation while treating the disease. Pneumonia appears to be the main cause of death.

Approximately 20-30% of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and pneumonia have required intensive care for respiratory support. The older population has shown to be the most vulnerable especially if they already had an underlying health condition.
The case fatality rate (the ratio of the number of deaths with specific illness divided by the total number of persons with given disease condition) was estimated around 2.3% from the first large batch of Wuhan data, which would be 20x more than the commonly accepted value for the flu of 0.1%. The most accurate estimate may be from the Diamond Princess: https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/diamond_cruise_cfr_estim
ates.html, where we get around 1.2%. A summary from some article Aerosol & Surface Stability of SARS-CoV-2:https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2004973, suggests that the highly contagious novel coronavirus can remain viable and infectious in droplets in the air for hours and on surfaces for days and perhaps the most disturbing is aerosolized droplets remaining viable suspended in air for up to 3 hours though It’s unclear how this may impact room turnaround time.

COVID-19 will be with us until the vast majority of us are immune. And it will be a serious medical problem until we have a very good treatment plan and vaccines to curb the virus. Countries all over the world are reasonably doing well about “Flattening the curve” which ideally means reducing the rate of spread of the virus. Our governments are doing all what they can as much as possible at the moment and countrymen and women have also been so good about observing handwashing, hand sanitizing, social distancing, cleaning public use surfaces like grocery carts, and wearing masks. This will slow the covid-19 spread down but it will not eliminate it. And also, the number of people who are ignoring the measures and directives that their respective governments are bringing up every now and then, is small but not zero yet this virus is quite contagious. This virus doesn’t take holidays and read books as well.
We cannot continue with self isolation forever. It’s now time for us to start preparing for a “new normal”. We must continue with observing our hand hygiene, cleaning surfaces, social distancing, mask wearing until we have the right vaccine or effective treatments. If we don’t take action, then we are risking restarting the exponential curve. Cities and towns need to provide handwashing stations, and businesses with sinks need to ensure that these facilities are fully functioning. A hand sanitizer should be everywhere including everyone’s pocket. Cleaning wipes need to be everywhere that multiple people touch the same surfaces since the human coronaviruses can remain infectious on inanimate objects from 2hrs up to 9days.
We need to elbow bump and bow instead of shaking hands. We need to ban all crowds – music festivals, sports stadiums, church gatherings etc. We need to do take out instead of sitting in our favorite cafes. We need to minimize mass travels as well as going to bars and restaurants even though this will be inconvenient. We’ll have to watch our favorite musician performances, athletes, and religious teachings online.
Online education has to become a norm and team sports, class trips and assemblies will have to be on hold. Public health measures must be ramped up: we need to get tested regularly and massively and we need to also follow up contacts of those who are sick. Telehealth needs to become more available in order to help in for example case identification. Reliable information services about the pandemic in all languages need to published and broadcast with call in options for questions. Surge capability needs improvement – this means more hospitals, hospital beds and equipments including basics like personal protective equipments, ventilators and oxygen. We need to recruit, train and compensate more medical professionals, more first responders, and all the support staff for hospitals.
There some people who are being hurt terribly in this pandemic – we need to support the wait staff, ground crews, transportation workers, people who live hand by mouth etc, who wiil have no jobs in this period as some minority groups will be capable of working online. Food, electricity, water and housing sources for all need to be secured for these affected groups of people.
Is there anyone who can guarantee how long this will all need to be carried on for? Do you have a clue? Incase you do, feel free to drop it down in the comments section. Perhaps all our hope lies in the hands of people currently carrying out clinical research on SARS-COV-2. A But in case we don’t take up these measures, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world will sadly die and hence we need to start now.