The world is facing a war against Coronavirus. Since the outbreak in China in February 2020, the virus keeps spreading all over the world and has claimed over 15,000 lives. This number has surpassed the previous epidemic, SARS in 2003-2004 which claimed 770 lives back then. This is a big hit in our history and many countries have to put on lockdown to protect the population. People are being told to stay at home to help the frontliner in saving lives.
Restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and many other non-essential shops are closed to minimize people’s contacts. This is a hard situation for everyone as our “normal” has to change for the sake of our lives and the people we love. We can no longer hang out for a Friday night and chat with our friends for weeks. However, at the moment this is the best that we can do to slow down the Corona to spread and allow the health care to breathe and each patient will have a proper treatment at the hospital.
What is happening now is not even the peak yet. WHO predicted that the peak of this virus will be different from one place to another. This is why a lockdown is important to do as a precaution to prevent the outbreak from happening like in China and Italy. However, there are millions of people that are still confused about how this is going.
Being in quarantine with less social interaction for weeks is not our habit and we started to think about when will this epidemic of this virus end. This is a tough question as we are still at the very early stage of this epidemic. It will take time to develop a vaccine against this disease and by the time, what we can do is to keep doing the precaution to slow down the virus from spreading. This Coronavirus is more contagious than SARS or MERS.
A professor from Hacettepe University, Mehmet Ceyhan, stated that hygiene is the key here to protect ourselves from the virus. We need to keep maintaining good hygiene such as frequent hand wash and disinfect the surroundings. Just like Flu or measles, Coronavirus can spread so easily during human contact through droplets. This is why the number increased rapidly.
The infection in the Coronavirus happens during the incubation period, which is about 14 days. This is why hygiene is vital and also to limit social contact between people. He also stated that the research to create the vaccine is still going on. However, we still do not know how successful the vaccine will be. Certainly, there is no guarantee here. It will take at least 1 year to finally get the vaccine and a year is a long time.
The second scenario is people will become immune by being infected. People that are becoming immune to the Coronavirus, will stop the virus from spreading. This is what we called natural immunity and this can take at least 2 years away. This can only be done if we will keep doing the social distance to slow down the virus from spreading. However, other questions also pop up about this natural immunity. What if one person gets the virus multiple times? Will they become immune for the 2nd time? Or how does it work? This is surely very confusing, especially for the elderly and those who have underlying health issues before Corona.
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This stage is still very early and what we can do best now is to slow it down by not passing it to other people that have high risk. This will be no clear endpoint that becomes the alternative while waiting for the vaccines or any drug to cure this Coronavirus. The scenario is that when the virus slows down, the intensive care will have less pressure and in the end, it can prevent death as each patient can be treated under intensive care.
By doing this, we are doing the precaution and this can help many countries to avoid a total lockdown which has a huge impact on their economic condition. Every person in this world plays an important role to fight against this Corona crisis. Thus, it is important to follow the newest strategy to stop this virus from spreading.
