Because the nation continues to navigate the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, Rekha Murthy, MD, vp of medical affairs and affiliate chief medical officer at Cedars-Sinai, spoke with Ms. Journal concerning the path ahead.
Murthy defined what the general public ought to anticipate the “new regular” will seem like and the way lengthy it’s going to final. She mentioned that testing will stay necessary till a vaccine is offered, together with preventative measures similar to bodily distancing, hand hygiene and wearing masks.
“It will all be a part of a sort of a ‘new regular’ of how we work together…till we get vaccines obtainable and are capable of present some assurance of immunity for sufficient of the inhabitants to attain a probability of lowering transmission, like we now have executed with different vaccine-preventable ailments—like measles or hen pox,” Murthy instructed Ms.
She explains within the article what makes the novel coronavirus distinctive from different viruses.
Murthy contrasted its lengthy incubation interval—as much as about 12 days—with that of influenza, which develops in a short time. As well as, it is a utterly new virus that people haven’t encountered earlier than, so there is not any inhabitants with immunity to the novel coronavirus, which spreads simply by respiratory droplets.
“The way in which it’s transmitted, coupled with the lengthy incubation interval, are distinctive components of this explicit pandemic and this virus—and the truth that it causes critical sickness, and that it may well trigger delicate sickness in many individuals,” Murthy instructed the journal. “We all know that 80% of individuals don’t get actually sick, so we now have this inhabitants of people who is perhaps harboring it, however have delicate sufficient signs they don’t actually discover. However they might be infectious to others by advantage of coughing or sneezing.”
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