COVID-19 is not going away soon as India is a densely populated country but there as following some basic steps like social distancing and wearing masks can help us in staying safe from the deadly disease, said Dr KK Aggarwal, Padma Shri & Renowned Interventional Cardiologist.
“It may stay for 2 years or more, but we needn’t fear. So, we need to understand and learn how to live with it. For this, we need to be cautious, wear masks compulsorily, and maintain social distancing; avoid gathering in close spaces as the exposure will be less in open space,” said Dr KK Aggarwal, while addressing HEAL-Thy Samvaad Episode-2. Healthwire.co is the media partner of the event.
Dr Aggarwal said emphasised that though a decline in the number of cases in Mumbai followed by Delhi with a fall in mortality rate has been observed recently, the chain of spread is not broken, which seems to bring severity in other cities too as COVID is all set to stay in India.
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He suggested that most of COVID-19 cases can be managed at home with the help of telemedicine and this will ease the burden on hospitals.
“To ease the burden upon the hospitals and to save the doctors, home quarantine is the solution. As more than 80% of COVID-19 cases have mild symptoms, so it can be managed at home with the help of telemedicine — this way, we will save the doctors. We can also try this at the community level rather than visiting the hospitals. We can fix a house for COVID-19, and put all positive patients of the community there with masking. Hence, home isolation seems to be the solution. More so, telemedicine and home isolation are the gifts of COVID-19 to the medical fraternity,” he added.
Deliberating on why some people are getting sick and some are not, Dr JC Suri, Chairman, JCS Institute of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine said, “Of the people getting infected with COVID-19 and falling sick, 80% are with mild symptoms, 15% with severity to be admitted to the hospitals and 5% with extreme conditions to be admitted in ICUs. When the virus enters our body, it is dealt with by body resistance. This resistance is of two types — the innate immunity and the acquired immunity.”
“If one’s innate immunity is strong, one can fight back the virus, if not, it will move towards severity. There are so many factors that impact innate immunity — sleep is one of them, a sound sleep of 7-8hour works as a natural immune booster. If young are falling sick, there is a genetic factor. There are demographic factors also as we have seen the high mortality rate in Spain, Germany, and the USA,” Dr Suri added.
