Every fever and cough is not coronavirus: DAK To People

SRINAGAR – “People should not mistake flu illness with coronavirus as both have similar symptoms which is fever and cough,” said Doc­tors Association Kashmir (DAK) on Saturday in a com­muniqué.

“Every fever and cough is not coronavirus,” said DAK President Dr Nisar ul Hassan.

“A suspect case of new coronavirus is one who has respiratory symptoms and has a history of travel to the affected area in the past 14 days or the one who has been in close contact with a confirmed case of coronavi­rus infection within the last 14 days,” he said.

Dr Nisar said despite simi­lar symptoms of coronavirus to flu, there are some impor­tant differences.

Quoting a study pub­lished in The Lancet, he said coronavirus cases do not exhibit upper respiratory tract symptoms like runny nose,sore throat and sneez­ing which are seen in most of flu cases.

Dr Nisar said the new coronavirus,like flu spreads mostly from person to per­son by respiratory droplets, but new research suggests coronavirus can also spread through feces and this could be the reason for the rapid spread of the virus.

“While this year’s flu vi­rus is hitting kids especially hard, coronavirus has large­ly spared this vulnerable group,” he added.

“Coronavirus, also called COVID-19 is a novel (new) vi­rus that originated in Wuhan city of China has killed 2,362 people and infected 77,925 people so far.

Men represent the majority of novel coronavirus cases, and they seem to die more often from this deadly infec­tion.

Research has found that the death rate among men was 2.8% compared to 1.7% among women.

Majority of the patients who died of novel coronavirus were older men with underly­ing health problems like dia­betes, hypertension and heart disease,” said Dr Nisar.