article on social distancing is the need of the hour
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Explanation:
The novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) that emerged in Wuhan, China in December 2019 now spread throughout the world. It is thought to be primarily transmitted by respiratory droplets with a similar generation time and incubation time as SARS coronavirus (SARSCoV) [1, 2].
It has been proved to be an important topic throughout human history to control the spread of infectious diseases such as the plague [3, 4] or the Spanish flu [5] [6]. Due to the worldwide outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) induced by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, it is of particular interest in the present time [7, 8].
Since now vaccines and antivirals are absent for this, only rigorous implementation of traditional public health measures can bring some remarkable achievement in this regard. The primary goal of such public health measures is to prevent person-to-person spread of disease by separating people to interrupt transmission. So this time we are only equipped with isolation and quarantine, social distancing and community containment which are currently being employed at an unprecedented massive scale throughout most of the world. Let us know how they are being used to control the novel coronavirus and what would be their challenges and benefits.
To interrupt the transmission, isolation of patients is found effective that too if there is possibility of early detection before overt viral shedding. Moreover, if we talk about influenza patients, they can already transmit the same before clinical symptoms set it; and to halt transmission and control an influenza pandemic, isolation is often too late to be sufficiently effective. However, the incubation time for SARS CoV is longer than for influenza (about 5 versus 2 days) [9], and once the patient is truly sick, the viral shedding was found to be the highest. A longer incubation time is required to identify cases and then to put them into isolation. Incubation time for 2019-nCoV also has a median of 5 days [10], however, shedding of virus and its peak transmissibility at this stage still remains unknown and how frequently pre-symptomatic cases result in secondary cases.
One of the most effective and oldest methods of controlling communicable disease outbreaks is ‘quarantine’. In Italy, in the fourteenth century this public health practice was widely used, when ships from plague-infected ports were arriving at the Venice port and they had to anchor and wait for 40 days (in Italian: quaranta for 40) before disembarking their surviving passengers[11]. The provided forty days incubation time is enough to be completed so that cases which are yet asymptomatic became symptomatic and could therefore be identified. There was a successful implementation of quarantine during the SARS epidemic in 2003 as an effective measure [12]. It may be applied at the individual or group level and usually involves restriction to the home or a designated facility. It may be voluntary or mandatory. During this duration, all the individuals should be monitored for the occurrence of any symptoms associated with it. If such symptoms occur, People must be immediately isolated if they are found symptomatic in a centre designated for that purpose and is familiar with treating severe respiratory illness[13].
In a broader community, where individuals may be infectious but have not yet been identified so they have not been isolated yet and in such a community ‘social distancing’ is designed to reduce interactions between people. Since if some disease is to be transmitted through respiratory droplets. It requires a close proximity of people, so social distancing among persons will reduce transmission. It has been observed that the occurrence of social distancing is particularly useful in settings where community transmission is believed to have occurred, but where there is unclear linkages between cases. It is also useful in cases where persons are under restrictions and those persons were known to have been exposed and this act of social distancing is considered insufficient to prevent further transmission [14]. So by keeping all this in mind we can include closure of schools, offices and suspension of public markets and cancellation of social gatherings whether at religious places or anywhere else under this umbrella term
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