At the end of December, public health officials from China informed the World Health Organization that they had a problem: an unknown, new virus was causing pneumonia-like illness in the city of Wuhan in Hubei province. They quickly determined that it was a coronavirus and that it was rapidly spreading through and outside of Wuhan.
Today, the entire world is seized with the menace of CoronaVirus (COVID-19) believed to have originated in China. The first reported case was on 31 December 2019 and now 188 countries are affected. The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared it a pandemic on 11 March 2020. Although China has now reported that it controlled and contained the epidemic, the virus has spread rapidly to cover almost the entire globe. The new hotspots are USA, Italy, and Spain, with Italy and Spain reporting 10779 and 7340 deaths respectively while the USA accounts for 2489 deaths; compared to China’s 3304 deaths . India as on 30 Mar 2020 had reported 1100 cases with a death toll of 29. Till date 735,015 cases are reported and the numbers are rising. 34,804 people have died and 156,122 have recovered. A total of 544,089 cases are still active and about 5% of these are critical. Of the closed cases, 18% have been reported to have died. Worst affected is Italy. India has reported 1100 cases as on 30th March 2020 and in the last two days more than 200 cases have been added to the affected number. In this connection, the alarming aspect is that while it took 40 days for the first fifty cases to come up, the next 50 were reported within a day , despite the Janata Curfew on 22 March. This makes the situation critical and though India may not be in Stage III (community spread) as yet, it looks like that we are close to it. According to media reports on 23 March 2020, Kerala and Bhilwara in Rajasthan have probably descended to Stage-III. Dr Ramanan Laxminarayanan, Director of Center for Disease, Economics and Policy has warned that India could be dealing with a tsunami of COVID-19. As per his estimate, India could be dealing with as many as 300 million cases of which 4-5 million could be serious. India needs to take a note of this rate criticality. As the Prime Minister in his address to the nation stated, the situation is grave, serious and every Indian needs to act responsibly to fight the menace with determination and show utmost discipline in personal conduct.
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