Dr. Shashank Samak writes on the current status of COVID-19, stressing that in order to understand the severity of coronavirus in comprison to other infections like HIV or TB, the basics of not only epidemiology but immunology should be studied, because every branch utilises a different way of looking at these things.

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Epidemiologically, the novel coronavirus is hardly 4 months old. Therefore, its spread in the community is yet to be assessed. But, a few epidemiologists even from the US, are putting out data in such a way that this novel coronavirus seems like just a normal influenza type virus with nothing to fear about. They are mentioning that deaths due to flu are comparable to nCorona, so why to create panic out of nothing?!

To support these claimes, they are putting out statistics in a way such that if total tests conducted in the general population are so many lakhs (e.g.10 lakhs), positive results are so many thousands (e.g. 50000), and total deaths are so many thousands (suppose 5000), and out of so many tests only a few test positive and only very few die- that is deaths per total population tested (positive, negative). This means incidence of nCorona is hardly 0.05% (50000 in 10 lakhs) and deaths are minuscule 0.005% (5000 in 10 lakhs).