Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a new virus. This started to spread in December 2019.

What are viruses? And what is Coronavirus?

Viruses are tiny organisms that cause various diseases in humans, plants and animals. The world has encountered attacks of different viruses, like wise this one is another devastating virus.

Viruses are so tiny that they can only be seen with a very powerful microscope.

There are more than 20000 viruses in the Earth. But these viruses can’t do anything without entering a host cell, here a human cell. In fact viruses are considered to be neither living nor dead, because they seem to be living inside the host cell but they show no signs of life in the outside environment.

Well of course coronavirus is the talk of the universe now and anybody will be eager to know how it shows its strength on us.

 How does it spread?

The science behind this is really easy to understand. The virus enters the human body through various ways:-

1. Physical contact :
   If you touch an infected person of an infected material and then keep your hand on your vital organs without washing it with soap, then it will enter your body. It enters your body through your mouth, nose, eyes and ears if you touch them.

2. Droplet infection :
   Well this sound different!  Droplet infection is an infection transmitted from one individual to another by droplets of moisture expelled out of the nasal passage by sneezing or coughing, without closing your mouth and nose with your hand or a handkerchief.

And that is why the doctors enforce us to:-

• Wash our hands regularly for 20 seconds, with soap and water or alcohol-based hand rub (hand sanitizer)
• Cover our nose and mouth with a disposable tissue or flex our elbow when we cough or sneeze.
• Use a mask if we have, to cover your mouth and nose.
• Avoid close contact (1 meter or 3 feet) with people.
• Stay home and self-isolate from others in the household if we feel unwell.
• Don’t touch our eyes, nose, or mouth if our hands are not clean.

How does it affect us?

Well nothing can take a big part of us if we are strong enough to manage it. This virus mainly affects our immune system which is why this can turn fatal for people with weak immune system. So to fight this disease if infected one needs to strengthen his or her immune system.

This coronavirus enters our body by all the different ways stated above and starts to reproduce rapidly. Now the next step for it is, to start the action on our cells. The virus enters our cells using a special mechanism called the “lock and key” mechanism. The new coronavirus has a “key” to get into cells. The “key” unlocks host cells by interacting with the “lock” in the host cells. Now this is where there is a division between the types of virus and their fatality.

Now there are two bifurcations in their types.

• The first one: – This type of virus mixes its DNA with the DNA of the host cell and lives there for years. They can live for days, years or even for your whole life time without affecting them.
• The second one: – In this one the virus after entering the host cells replicates rapidly and then it breaks the host cell in which it lived. Thus it has a higher probability to become fatal.

Now coronavirus is of the second type and thus we need to be more and more careful. Thus this is why the governments have been taking tireless efforts to keep away from infection.

How to treat it?

We know that as of now no particular cure for killing the virus as this is a newly occurring virus. But in the hospitals the doctors treat the patients only to their symptoms and they have advanced machines to facilitate the patient that is all. They give medicines to only to treat the fever and other symptoms. Thus we have to protect ourselves. We can only take medicines to strengthen our immunity.

We have heard people say “Prevention is better than cure” and that is the only way we got in our hands.

And nobody can be assured that an already cured patient will not get the disease again. In fact we can see some unfortunate cases like them.

So buddies it is time to pull up our socks and protect ourselves from this yet another devastating virus.

Hope everything settles faster and everybody will be safe. Stay safe stay protected…..