Coronavirus: good practices and behaviors to follow
The Italian Ministry of Health and the Higher Institute of Health published a decalogue for the prevention of coronavirus infection.
Coronaviruses (CoVs) are a family of respiratory viruses called so because their surface is similar to a crown; they are common in many animal species, but, in some rare cases, they can infect humans and then spread into the population. These days the global focus is on a new coronavirus, never identified before, the one first reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019, now called SARS-CoV-2.
Like other respiratory diseases, SARS-CoV-2 infection can cause both mild symptoms such as cold, sore throat, cough and fever, as well as more severe symptoms such as pneumonia and breathlessness.
As the symptoms are very similar to those of other pathologies (e.g. the common cold and seasonal flu), laboratory tests can be performed to confirm the diagnosis.
The coronavirus differs from seasonal flu due to lack of vaccine and lack of immunity; this means that no human being is immune.
For now, there are no vaccines or drugs; that is why restrictive measures have been taken in the population to limit and slow the circulation of the virus and thus reduce the number of infection.
One of the main dangers of Coronavirus is not so much related to the lethality of the same, but more to the high transmissibility; if you fall ill with COVID-19, 20% of Italians, or enter quarantine, could block services, crowd hospitals and undermine the overall productivity of the nation.
For this reason, a decalogue for the prevention of contagion is located on the website of the Ministry of Health, prepared in collaboration with the Higher Institute of Health.
You can see the decalogue by following this link.
To keep up to date on Coronavirus we highly recommend to consult official and reliable sites, click here to reach the section dedicated to Coronavirus on the portal of the Ministry of Health.