New Delhi: Indian-American physician and oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New Yorker magazine explained the relationship between the amount of virus a person is exposed to and the severity of the illness that a person faces. He suggested that such a relationship has been seen with other viruses as well and argued that it could be the same for coronavirus, which is why medical staff may be at a higher risk.
Many people from the medical field have succumbed to the disease even though they are very young. This could be because they are being exposed to large quantities of the virus. Thus, discovering the relationship between amount of virus one is exposed to and the severity of illness subsequently can help identify patients at higher risk.
Falling temperatures in US
There is evidence that the situation in the US is getting better. People seem to be recovering from the coronavirus in many parts of the country. This evidence is coming from health technology firm Kinsa Health’s database. Kinsa Health thermometers are linked to the internet and temperature readings are sent to a cloud database. As people in America get checked for fever, data gets uploaded to the database. There is a heat map that shows the temperature across the US and it appears that many regions have started cooling now. This is evidence that the country’s social distancing measures and lockdowns have proven to be effective.
BCG vaccine & India
Professor Gobardhan Das of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, a very well-known Indian immunologist, has said that because of the BCG vaccine, Indians may have residual immunity to many respiratory infections including Covid-19. A new study has shown the correlation between the universal BCG vaccination policy and Covid-19 fatalities.
Countries with BCG vaccine in their vaccination policy have been affected less by the Covid-19. Iran also has BCG vaccine in its vaccination policy, but they included it in 1984. This means most of the older people didn’t receive this vaccine and they are the ones who are at the highest risk of fatality from Covid-19.
Protecting the messenger
The Union Government had recently asked the Supreme Court to put curbs on media publications for news related to the coronavirus. The Supreme Court didn’t allow this and just asked the media to be careful. Renowned economist Amartya Sen has said that democracies don’t have big epidemics, and big man-made avoidable calamities just because they have a free media, and free civil society. Nobody has questioned the credibility of coronavirus figures in India because of its free media, whereas this hasn’t been the case for China.
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