HEALTH

                If a person develops symptoms of Coronavirus disease no matter the way get infected with, the doctor will determine whether to conduct tests for Coronavirus based on the symptoms, as well as having close contact with someone diagnosed with Coronavirus or traveled to or lived in any areas with ongoing community spread of Covid-19 in the past 14 days, the doctor may also consider testing if there is a higher risk of serious illness, to test for Coronavirus, a health care provider uses a long swab to take a nasal sample or a coughing up saliva sample. The sample is then sent to a lab for testing. There are laboratory tests that can identify the virus that causes Coronavirus in respiratory specimens, state and local public health departments have received tests from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC while medical providers are getting tests developed by commercial manufacturers. Scientists across the world are rac...

                More than a million cases of Coronavirus have been registered globally, according to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins University, another grim milestone as the world grapples with the spreading pandemic, nearly 54,000 have died and more than 212,000 have recovered, the US has the most cases and more than 1,000 died there in the past day, the disease first emerged in central China three months ago, though the Italy kept be Johns Hopkins records one million confirmed cases, the actual number is thought to be much higher, it took a month and a half for the first 100,000 cases to be registered, a million was reached after a doubling in cases over the past week. Nearly a quarter of cases have been registered in the United States while Europe accounts for around half, the pandemic is taking a huge economic toll, as an extra 6.6 million Americans applied for unemployment benefit last week. Morgues and hospitals in New York City...

             The governments have ordered thousands of ventilators to help ease the pressure on hospitals caused by the Coronavirus crisis, for patients with the worst effects of the infection, a ventilator offers the best chance of survival. Simply put, a ventilator takes over the body's breathing process when disease has caused the lungs to fail, this gives the patient time to fight off the infection and recover, various types of medical ventilation can be used.                                                                   According to the World Health Organization WHO, some 80% of people with Covid-19 recover without needing hospital treatment, in these severe cases, the virus causes damage to the lungs, the body's immune system detects this and expands blood vessels so more ...

                   Countries across the globe are taking unprecedented measures to prevent the Coronavirus spreading, ranging from the extreme to the relaxed to the creative. More than a third of the planet's population is under some from of restriction, the World Health Organization, which has officially declared the outbreak a pandemic, has called on all countries to continue efforts that have been effective in limiting the number of cases and slowing the spread of the Covid-19. While lock down is not a technical term used by public health officials, it can refer to anything from mandatory geographic quarantines to non mandatory recommendations to stay at home, closures of certain types of businesses or bans on events and gatherings, according to Lindsay Wiley, a health law professor at the Washington College of Law, Coronavirus restrictions and legislation have already led to political unrest and major governmental changes. On Mon...

                The race is on to find out how the deadly Coronavirus jumped from animals to humans, Helen Briggs looks at how scientists are trying to trace the source of the outbreak. Somewhere in China, a bat flits across the sky, leaving a trace of Coronavirus in its droppings, which fall to the forest floor. A wild animal, possibly a pangolin snuffling for insects among the leaves, picks up the infection from excrement, the novel Covid-19 circulates in wildlife, eventually an infected animal is captured and a person somehow catches the disease, then passes it on to workers at a wildlife market. A global outbreak is born, scientists are attempting to prove the truth of this scenario as they work to find wild animals harboring the Coronavirus. Finding the sequence of events is a bit of a detective story , says Prof Andrew Cunningham of Zoological Society London ZSL, A range of wild animal species could be the host, in particular bats which...

               We can pick up virus by touching surfaces contaminated with the new Coronavirus, but it is only just becoming clear how long the virus can survive outside the human body. As Coronavirus has spread, so has our fear of surfaces, these are now some familiar scenes in public places around the world people trying to open doors with their elbows, commuters studiously surfing their way through train journeys to avoid grabbing a handle, office workers rubbing down their desks each morning. In the areas worst hit by the new Coronavirus, teams of Workers in protective clothing have been dispatched to spray a fog of disinfectant in plazas, parks and public streets. Cleaning regimes in offices, hospitals, shops and restaurants have been increased, in some cities well meaning volunteers even venture out at night to scrub the keypads of cash machines. Like many respiratory viruses, including flu, COVID-19 can be spread in tiny droplets relea...

                  Their eyes are tired, their cheekbones rubbed raw from protective masks, they don't smile. The doctors and nurses on the front line of the Coronavirus pandemic in Italy are almost unrecognizable behind their masks, scrubs, gloves and hairnets, the flimsy battle armor donned at the start of each shift as the only barrier to contagion. Associated press photographers fanned out on Friday to photograph them during rare breaks from hospital intensive care units in the Lombardy region cities of Bergamo, Brescia and Rome, in each case, doctors, nurses and paramedics posed in front of forest green surgical draps, the bland backdrop of their sterile wards. Friday was a bad day in Italy as registered the most deaths since the country's outbreak had exploded five weeks earlier, adding 969 more victims to raise the world's highest COVID-19 toll to more than 9,000 which makes Italy surpassed China in total confirmed cases, stands beh...

 It wasn't until late December that Chinese officials realized they had a new virus on their hands but even then, China's government clamped down on sharing information about it with the public, according to The Wall Street Journal. A person believed to be the first ever human infected with COVID-19 has broken her silence, Wei Guixian is a 57 year old seafood merchant at the Huanan Market in Wuhan where the virus is suspected to have first made the jump from a bat to human, she described how she first started to feel ill on December 10, believing she had caught a cold or maybe the flu. "I felt a bit tired but not as tired as previous years, every winter, I always suffer from the flu, so i thought it was the flu" she said. The next day she walked to a small local clinic and got the usual treatment and an injection, before going back to work, the first steps in a global pandemic that has infected over half a million and killed more than 25,000 so far. When her symp...

                 As the new Coronavirus that has killed more than 24,000 people continues to spread around the world, Russia has stepped up its measures to tackle the pandemic and prevent its spread within the country, there have been 1,036 cases of COVID-19 infections reported in Russia so far and 4 deaths. The authorities confirmed 196 new cases on Friday, bringing the country's official number of cases up to more than thousand and making the largest one-day increase in cases so far, it also said one person had died in the past 24 hours, taking the total number of deaths to 4, Russia will suspend all regular and charter flights to other countries starting today, President Vladimir Putin has declared that the week from March 28 to April 5 will be a nationwide paid holiday to encourage Russians to stay home and slow the spread of the virus. All restaurants and cafes have been ordered to close during this time with the exception of delive...