Читать книгу Enabling Healthcare 4.0 for Pandemics - Группа авторов - Страница 15

COVID-19 is a contagious disease and can transmit through touch, contact or droplets of infected person. This transmission of COVID-19 is divided into 4 stages as:

1st Stage: During 1st stage infection spread across the countries. People with travel history of foreign countries are being tested for this virus. There is no local transmission at this stage so the possibility of number of patients suffering from disease remains quite low.

2nd Stage: At this stage the infection occurs locally and transmits through the infected patients of stage 1. In this stage along with the testing of the suspected patient, the source of the infection has also been identified to get him separate out from the entire community. The number of patients increases at this stage, though is not very difficult to manage. Social distancing is the best option to remain in stage 2 for avoiding further spread of the infection.

3rd Stage: In this stage, group transmission occurs and the number of cases increases rapidly. It becomes very difficult to find and isolate the source of transmission. It becomes difficult to deal with the situation in this stage because of substantial growth of number of patients [5].

Figure 1.1 Confirmed cases in top 3 countries in the number of cases (Cumulative).

4th Stage: This stage is the most risky and deadly stage of this pandemic because infection transmits in the form of batches in the entire city or country. A large number of population gets infected during this stage irrespective of their age and immunity. The death cases also get increased during this stage and old age people and people with low immunity become the most affected patients from this disease. It becomes very difficult or almost impossible to control the spread the virus at this stage.

Figure 1.1 above shows the confirmed cases in the top three countries in number of cases across the world, starting from March, 2020 till mid July 2020. The US has the highest number of cases, followed by Brazil and then India on number three in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases [6].