Page 28 - Dream May 2020 English

COVID-19 SPECIAL
PROCEDURES
The science of COVID-19 tests
Gaurav Jain
The novel coronavirus emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan last December and proliferated to almost the whole world within a couple of months. Contrary to popular perception, the term coronavirus actually refers to a category of viruses that cause respiratory infections including the common cold. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has forced nearly the entire humanity to a grinding halt, belongs to the same family of viruses. Coronavirus Disease 2019 or COVID-19 is the disease that it causes. Viruses are submicroscopic entities lying on the borderline of what we define as living. Their existence was a mystery for years until scientists like Adolf Mayer, Dmitri Ivanovsky, Ernst Ruska, Max Knoll and Martinus Willem Beijerinck deciphered it.
Viruses are unique because they cannot replicate as independent entities. But as soon as a virus enters a living cell, it takes over its functioning and starts multiplying. Viruses are lighter and smaller than bacteria. We are lucky SARS-CoV-2 is not air-borne, or else, it would have been a serious threat to humankind.
We are consistently adding to our knowledge about SARS- CoV-2, originally known as the novel coronavirus. We know it spreads through droplets expelled from the respiratory tract (the mouth and nose) while coughing, sneezing, and breathing
of the infected individuals. This is the reason almost all nations have adopted social distancing and lockdown as preventive measures. After prevention comes the eradication of the outbreak. All countries, including India, are making serious efforts in this regard.
Tackling the outbreak
Normally, all infectious diseases have two stages: containment, meaning to limit the spread of infection and mitigation, which refers to the steps taken to reduce the severity of the disease. The process of containment should start as soon as the initial cases of infection are found. It involves health workers identifying all people who could potentially come into the contact of an infected person. Health workers counsel them and advise them to self-isolate. This can contain the spread of the virus.
The second stage comes when the outbreak becomes so widespread that the existing public health infrastructure is no longer capable to test and identify all the cases. The overwhelming of testing capabilities mean governments can neither estimate the actual number of sick people requiring urgent treatment nor can they count the casualties due to the disease.
The third stage sets in when there is the danger of the
(Image by Esther Kim & Carl T. Bergstrom | CC BY via Wikimedia Commons)
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