Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease which is caused by a newly discovered coronavirus.
In this disease, people who fall sick with COVID-19 will experience mild to moderate symptoms and recover without special treatment.
Coronavirus is a large family virus that causes illness to common cold to more severe disease.
The virus that causes COVID-19 is mainly transmitted through droplets generated when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or exhales.
These droplets are too heavy to hang in the air, and quickly fall on floors or surfaces.
You can be infected by breathing in the virus if you are within close proximity of someone who has COVID-19,
or by touching a contaminated surface and then your eyes,nose or mouth.
COVID-19 affects different people in different ways. Most infected people will develop mild to moderate illness and recover without hospitalization.
fever.
dry cough.
tiredness.
Less common symptoms:
aches and pains.
sore throat.
diarrhoea.
conjunctivitis.
headache.
loss of taste or smell.
a rash on skin, or discolouration of fingers or toes.
Serious symptoms:
difficulty breathing or shortness of breath.
chest pain or pressure.
loss of speech or movement.
Seek immediate medical attention if you have serious symptoms. Always call before visiting your doctor or health facility.
People with mild symptoms who are otherwise healthy should manage their symptoms at home.
On average it takes 5–6 days from when someone is infected with the virus for symptoms to show, however it can take up to 14 days.
Wash your hands regularly with soap and water, or clean them with alcohol-based hand rub.
Maintain at least 1 metre distance between you and people coughing or sneezing.
Avoid touching your face.
Cover your mouth and nose when coughing or sneezing.
Stay home if you feel unwell.
Refrain from smoking and other activities that weaken the lungs.
Practice physical distancing by avoiding unnecessary travel and staying away from large groups of people.
Covering your mouth and nose is one of the most critical thing a person can do to along with social distancing and washing hands toslow the spread of coronavirus.
Across the world, face masks are increasingly viewed as a step out of lockdown, with some countries mandating them in public.
There have been concerns that people will rush to buy medical-grade masks causing the NHS to face even greater supply shortages, and that masks could create a false sense of security and lead to a lapse in social distancing.
It is also unclear whether or not face masks actually protect individuals against the novel coronavirus.
But emerging evidence suggests the benefits may outweigh the risks. We now know that people are infectious before symptoms of the Covid-19 disease start to appear, and some never show any symptoms at all. In a report from April 23, researchers from Imperial College of London pointed out that around 40 per cent of infections among healthcare workers seems to occur before symptoms set in. So the argument is that, rather than protecting healthy wearers from infection, face masks could prevent carriers who are either asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic from unknowingly spreading the virus to others when coughing, sneezing, or during a conversation.
The problem is that testing the efficacy of face masks is no easy task. Randomised control trials – where one group has the intervention being tested and the other receives an alternative intervention, a placebo or no intervention at all – are the gold standard for studying causal relationships.
But while it is possible to control confounding factors in a laboratory, randomised control trials tend to produce little evidence of effects when done on people in their households or in public.
Julii Brainard, a senior researcher in health protection at the University of East Anglia, and her colleagues looked at 31 published studies about how well face masks protect against influenza-like illness and found poor compliance in most studies conducted as randomised control trials.
That is because participants who were supposed to wear the masks often didn’t wear them and people who weren’t supposed to wear them did, which skewed the results.
“Part of the reason why the research has been so difficult is that what should be our best-quality experiments aren’t very good. So we’re then stuck with what are called observational studies where researchers ask people what they did,” says Brainard.
In households where an infected person and their housemate both wore masks, the healthy members of the household were indeed 19 per cent less likely to become ill. There are however many transmission paths for viruses within a household, says Brainard, which makes it difficult to work out where and how someone may have caught an illness or not.
The scientific debate over the use of face masks to prevent the spread of coronavirus is also revealing a double standard, says Babak Javid, a professor at the Tsinghua University School of Medicine in Beijing and a consultant in infectious diseases at Cambridge University Hospitals.
Despite the lack of trials looking at how different hand-washing practices stop the spread of coronavirus, governments and health institutions still advocated the 20-second rule. “There have been similar sorts of [laboratory] studies for hand washing, and they’re equally disappointing,” he says adding that there have also been no trials to test the two-metre social distancing rule in public.
In this disease, people who fall sick with COVID-19 will experience mild to moderate symptoms and recover without special treatment.
Coronavirus is a large family virus that causes illness to common cold to more severe disease.
HOW IT SPREADS
The virus that causes COVID-19 is mainly transmitted through droplets generated when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or exhales.
These droplets are too heavy to hang in the air, and quickly fall on floors or surfaces.
You can be infected by breathing in the virus if you are within close proximity of someone who has COVID-19,
or by touching a contaminated surface and then your eyes,nose or mouth.
COVID-19 affects different people in different ways. Most infected people will develop mild to moderate illness and recover without hospitalization.
Most common symptoms:
fever.
dry cough.
tiredness.
Less common symptoms:
aches and pains.
sore throat.
diarrhoea.
conjunctivitis.
headache.
loss of taste or smell.
a rash on skin, or discolouration of fingers or toes.
Serious symptoms:
difficulty breathing or shortness of breath.
chest pain or pressure.
loss of speech or movement.
Seek immediate medical attention if you have serious symptoms. Always call before visiting your doctor or health facility.
People with mild symptoms who are otherwise healthy should manage their symptoms at home.
On average it takes 5–6 days from when someone is infected with the virus for symptoms to show, however it can take up to 14 days.
To prevent infection and to slow transmission of COVID-19, Follow these below steps:
Wash your hands regularly with soap and water, or clean them with alcohol-based hand rub.
Maintain at least 1 metre distance between you and people coughing or sneezing.
Avoid touching your face.
Cover your mouth and nose when coughing or sneezing.
Stay home if you feel unwell.
Refrain from smoking and other activities that weaken the lungs.
Practice physical distancing by avoiding unnecessary travel and staying away from large groups of people.
Covering your mouth and nose is one of the most critical thing a person can do to along with social distancing and washing hands toslow the spread of coronavirus.
Across the world, face masks are increasingly viewed as a step out of lockdown, with some countries mandating them in public.
There have been concerns that people will rush to buy medical-grade masks causing the NHS to face even greater supply shortages, and that masks could create a false sense of security and lead to a lapse in social distancing.
It is also unclear whether or not face masks actually protect individuals against the novel coronavirus.
But emerging evidence suggests the benefits may outweigh the risks. We now know that people are infectious before symptoms of the Covid-19 disease start to appear, and some never show any symptoms at all. In a report from April 23, researchers from Imperial College of London pointed out that around 40 per cent of infections among healthcare workers seems to occur before symptoms set in. So the argument is that, rather than protecting healthy wearers from infection, face masks could prevent carriers who are either asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic from unknowingly spreading the virus to others when coughing, sneezing, or during a conversation.
The problem is that testing the efficacy of face masks is no easy task. Randomised control trials – where one group has the intervention being tested and the other receives an alternative intervention, a placebo or no intervention at all – are the gold standard for studying causal relationships.
But while it is possible to control confounding factors in a laboratory, randomised control trials tend to produce little evidence of effects when done on people in their households or in public.
Julii Brainard, a senior researcher in health protection at the University of East Anglia, and her colleagues looked at 31 published studies about how well face masks protect against influenza-like illness and found poor compliance in most studies conducted as randomised control trials.
That is because participants who were supposed to wear the masks often didn’t wear them and people who weren’t supposed to wear them did, which skewed the results.
“Part of the reason why the research has been so difficult is that what should be our best-quality experiments aren’t very good. So we’re then stuck with what are called observational studies where researchers ask people what they did,” says Brainard.
In households where an infected person and their housemate both wore masks, the healthy members of the household were indeed 19 per cent less likely to become ill. There are however many transmission paths for viruses within a household, says Brainard, which makes it difficult to work out where and how someone may have caught an illness or not.
The scientific debate over the use of face masks to prevent the spread of coronavirus is also revealing a double standard, says Babak Javid, a professor at the Tsinghua University School of Medicine in Beijing and a consultant in infectious diseases at Cambridge University Hospitals.
Despite the lack of trials looking at how different hand-washing practices stop the spread of coronavirus, governments and health institutions still advocated the 20-second rule. “There have been similar sorts of [laboratory] studies for hand washing, and they’re equally disappointing,” he says adding that there have also been no trials to test the two-metre social distancing rule in public.
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