The virus spread at an astonishingly quick rate, which explains why many were caught off guard. An individual with a flu virus infects an average of 1.4 individuals. If each infected person spreads the flu it to another, 28 people will be infected by the 10th transmission period. The coronavirus is contagious, an individual with COVID-19 on an average infects about three other people. By the same calculation, if each one of the three were to infect three other people, the number of people diagnosed would be a whopping 59,059 by the 10th cycle.
“People haven’t been seeing an absurd amount of the cases of COVID-19 just yet.” a neonatal consultant at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, United Kingdom, Amit Gupta told The Caravan. According to Gupta, the India needs a better strategy about ways to respond to the outbreak. He mentions that there are a several problems on the medical side. India similar to many other countries, has misused time in the denial about the situation instead of taking early measures. Even though the shutdown will have its dire consequences it is necessary. Afterall, the virus operates the same everywhere, India won’t be spared either.
The quiet before the storm
So far, India has remained an outlier in the number of cases, but only in theory. There is little time to scale up medical infrastructure or the number of ventilators—nevertheless, it must be done. It is time to act and not just talk, our leads have to take drastic measures whether that includes constituting a national task-force, spreading public awareness, enforcing curfews or opening up field hospitals. The virus merely took 67 days to reach one lakh people, then 11 days for the next lakh and just four days to reach three lakh around the globe. For a densely populated country like India, this is the quiet before the storm, we have a lot more fatilities coming our way before things even start to look any better. We got to prepare like it is war because the coronavirus is contagious and it kills.
