Name: Coronavirus | Explained by Dhruv Rathee
Uploaded: 2020-02-25T19:31:41.000Z
Duration: 10 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

As on 5th February, 2020, due to the widely spreading corona virus all over the globe ,

Advanced passive voice

more than 24,000 people have been infected

Is it really that dangerous? Do you really need to be afraid?

Or is the media making a mountain out of a molehill and creating an atmosphere of fear?

The first thing you need to understand is that Corona Virus is not the name of a single virus

The name Corona Virus has been assigned to a family of viruses

The common cold- the cough and cold that you catch during winters- that too, is a type of Corona Virus

In 2002-03, a SARS virus had become widespread, if you remember. That too, was a type of Corona Virus

And what is affecting the people right now is a new type of Corona Virus

It was found there on 31st December, 2019

This new strain of Corona Virus has been named N-COV - Novel Corona Virus

This strain is so new that they could not even think of a name

The new Corona Virus looks somewhat like this

The original source of most of the Corona Viruses is mostly some animal

which affects a human and then later through human to human contact

and through human to human transmission, these corona viruses spread amongst humans

For example, in the case of SARS, the original source was a bat

MERS is another similar Corona Virus which spread in the Middle East during 2012-13

The exact original source of the new Corona Virus which has not yet been discovered

Some scientists suspect that the original source might be snakes

But some scientists believe that they might be bats again

because there are 96% similarities in the new corona virus as compared to the Corona Virus that came from bats

The symptoms of all these Corona Viruses are very similar to each other

For example, cough, cold, headache, fever, chills, sore throat-

All these happen to you even when you catch a cough and cold normally or when you catch a seasonal flu

And these are the symptoms of the New Corona Virus too

This is an unfortunate thing because due to this, it is very difficult to recognize

when you have contracted a normal seasonal flu and when you have contracted the New Corona Virus

When there are extreme cases of Corona Virus, then one may contract pneumonia too

But generally, the doctors have to perform a laboratory test to recognize whether it is a normal flu or

The incubation period of the Novel Corona Virus is between 2-11 days

that is, if you are infected, it might take 11 days for the symptoms to show up

This basically means that in the last two weeks

if you haven't been to China or haven't been in touch with a Chinese person

and despite that you're showing these symptoms, then you have no cause to worry

This means that you have not contracted the Novel Corona Virus

In order to know this, I'd like to show you some facts

The total number of infected people until now are 24,579

Out of these, around 494 people have died

And 955 people have recovered after becoming infected

So looking at  the total number infected people and the total number of deaths as a  proportion,

then this comes out to be approximately 2%

Mortality rate means that incase you contract the infection or the Novel Corona Virus,

then what are the chances that you are going to die because of it?

2% means that there is a 98% chance that you are not going to die because of it

In fact, upon studying the cases until now, it has been found out that

most of the people that died due to the Novel corona Virus

already had weak immune systems due to some other reasons

Most of these people were elderly and old

or their immune system was already weak beforehand for example, a heart disease or any other problem

An interesting thing about viruses is that the virus that spreads more easily and is more contagious

in general, its mortality rate is automatically less

And the Viruses that have a higher mortality rate are less contagious

That is if you contract Ebola, then there are 70% chances that you are going to die because of that

But only 3,000 cases were reported. So Ebola was not that contagious

On the other hand, take the example of common cold or chicken pox

Both chicken pox and common cold spread very easily

But in case you contract it, then the mortality rate of common cold is 0.01%

So all of this can be represented on a graph

The mortality rate is plotted on the Y axis

and the contagiousness, that is, how easily it can spread is plotted on the x axis

and there is a number to measure contagiousness

This number means that one infected person will infect how many other people on an average

For example, look at the contagiousness number  of common cold- it is 6

This means that if a person contracts common cold,

then on average, he will infect 6 more people

The contagiousness of chicken pox is even more- around 8.5

As for other examples, consider Swine flu. Its contagiousness and mortality rate both are very low

and it has a mortality rate of a mere 0.2%

Consider rabies. Rabies does not spread very easily but in case you contract it,

then there are almost 100% chances that you might die because of this infection

The SARS of 2003 had a mortality rate of 10%

So it is being estimated that the mortality rate of the Novel Corona Virus will amount to around 2%

but enough data is not available in order to measure how contagious it is

So we cannot exactly say where it will be placed on the graph

A range has been designated that the Novel Corona Virus will fall within it

So by this, we can conclude that in comparison to the SARS, Ebola  and MERS, the Novel Corona Virus

is less deadly because it mortality rate is lesser than all of these

but it might be more contagious than them

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Coronavirus | Explained by Dhruv Rathee

immune

recognize

panic

contagious