COVID-19: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO STAY SAFE

The earlier you believe in the science of Novel Coronavirus and follow the necessary measures, the better the chances of protecting yourself and reducing its spread to people. Otherwise, your denial and ignorance will simply add you to the already 177,000 people that lost their precious lives through this disease as at 22nd of April 2020 I think no sane person will think this death toll was orchestrated just to deceive people about something that wasn’t already there. There are roughly 2.5million cases of Covid-19 worldwide though about 688,000 patients recovered which supports the claims of WHO that so far the fatality rate of the disease is 3%.

Covid-19 is contagious, and it has an incubation period of 14days, meaning that you can contract the disease and can take up to 14days without any symptoms. And there’s high probability within this period of its incubation in you, to be transmitted to others. This makes its basic reproduction number very scary. The basic reproduction number is the expected number of cases directly generated by one case in a population where all individuals are susceptible to the infection. One person with the virus can infect five or more, and those five can also infect another five and before you could say a Jack, virtually everyone would be at risk especially that we have fewer testing centres. And get to know that figures given by the NCDC is only for those that got tested which I am afraid, there might be more positive cases roaming among us that have not been tested. Do you now understand why quarantining everyone is important in tackling its spread?

Let’s talk about susceptibility as not everyone has similar susceptibility status (likelihood to be infected) depending on one’s age and other medical conditions. Majorly children and aged individuals are at more risk compared to healthy people of average ages. Moreso, some after being infected may develop mild symptoms and recovered whereas others could be acute and eventually lead to death. You may be young, healthy and strong yet, you can infect your aged parents, and they may die while you survive just like it happened in Italy when people left the red zone prior to lockdown, infected their aged parents in the towns which led to multitude death. Therefore, understanding this will enable us to know that patients of Covid-19 has different stages, different level of complications and threats to people surrounding us.

Moreover, must every positive case be confined at the isolation or rather cohort centre? Not necessarily, especially those that are yet to develop any symptoms. They are usually advised to self-isolate in their houses while NCDC is keeping track of their record. Each state has a surveillance data clerk that is responsible for collating such data. Remember the case of Nasir Elrufai and Bala Muhammad, Governors of Kaduna and Bauchi states respectively, none of which has been taken to isolation centre despite having tested positive. We should not therefore think to see all the figures we have in a state within the state isolation centre. 

Finally, there’s continuous flow of information on this pandemic by so many people on social media platforms some of which are recordings, clips etc making it difficult for some people to understand the truth from the otherwise, a termed known as infodemic. Kindly do yourself a favour and listen to only the authorites concerned not just every Tom, Dick and Harry that has virtually no knowledge or whatever training in that aspect to lure you into harm. You are far better off to buy into such rubbish.

We should also please desist from sharing such unverified and misleading information during this trying time, let’s enlighten people and let’s assist in maintaining sanity in our society.

Let’s stay calm and stay safe!

May Allah protect us from this outbreak!