Philanthropist Bill Gates has urged wealthy countries to help low and middle-income countries strengthen their health systems in hopes of slowing the spread of the coronavirus. Gates further said that coronavirus has started to behave like a "once-in-a-century" pathogen. In an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine on Friday, the former chairman and chief executive of Microsoft Corp, wrote that "by helping countries in Africa and South Asia get ready now, we can save lives and also slow the global circulation of this virus". The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already pledged $100 million to fight the outbreak.
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Philanthropist Bill Gates has urged wealthy countries to help low and middle-income countries strengthen their health systems in hopes of slowing the spread of the coronavirus. Gates further said that coronavirus has started to behave like a "once-in-a-century" pathogen. In an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine on Friday, the former chairman and chief executive of Microsoft Corp, wrote that "by helping countries in Africa and South Asia get ready now, we can save lives and also slow the global circulation of this virus". The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already pledged $100 million to fight the outbreak.

The government has issued a health advisory for the elderly population during the Covid-19 pandemic which includes advising them not to go for routine checkups to hospital. Elderly people have been asked to make tele-consultation with your healthcare provider as far as possible. It has also advised the elderly to postpone elective surgeries like cataract surgery or total knee replacement.

The government has launched a toll-free helpline number for people who may face any mental health issue due to the ongoing countrywide lockdown to contain the spread of coronavirus.&nbsp;In its daily briefing on the coronavirus situation in the country, the health ministry said on Sunday the National Institute of Mental Health and&nbsp;Neuro-Sciences&nbsp;has launched the number.&nbsp;Earlier, WHO had warned that the coronavirus crisis and the restrictive measures can have a negative impact on people's mental health and well-being.&nbsp;

Practo, a leading digital healthcare start-up on Saturday announced that Covid-19 tests are now available on the platform. Bengaluru-based Practo has partnered with Thyrocare to conduct the detection tests, which has been authorised by the Government of India and the Indian Council of Medical Research. Practo is starting the test with Mumbai residents and will soon expand it to the rest of the country. A valid doctor's prescription, duly filled Test Requisition Form signed by the physician, and a photo ID card has to be presented at the time of testing. The test will be available at a cost of Rs 4,500 and can be booked online.

The lack of protective gear for health workers battling the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most pressing threats in the fight to prevent deaths, the World Health Organization warned&nbsp; on Friday.&nbsp;WHO chief Tedros Adhanom&nbsp;shared that the global health body&nbsp;has shipped almost two million individual items of personal protective equipment&nbsp;to 74 countries and was preparing to send a similar amount to a further 60 countries.&nbsp;He urged the G20 countries to use their "industrial might and innovation" to produce and distribute the tools needed to save more lives.

Amid the fast-spreading pandemic, researchers, including one of Indian-origin, have found that half of the patients they treated for mild Covid-19 infection still carried the coronavirus pathogen for up to eight days after symptoms disappeared.&nbsp;In a study, published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, researchers picked 16 Covid-19 patients, who were treated and released from the PLA General Hospital in China between January 28 and February 9.&nbsp;Patients studied had a median age of 35.5 years.&nbsp;Researchers suggest extending quarantine for at least two more weeks even after recovery, just to be on the safe side.

British charity The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Durham University will be working with medical detection dogs to determine if they could help sniff out the Covid-19 virus. The new research follows previous studies of&nbsp;their ability to diagnosis&nbsp;malaria through their keen sense of smell and is based on a belief that each disease triggers a distinct odour. Rsearchers have started&nbsp;preparations to train dogs in six weeks "to help provide a rapid, non-invasive diagnosis towards the tail end of the epidemic".&nbsp;The charity has previously trained dogs to detect diseases such as cancer, Parkinson's and bacterial infections by sniffing samples taken from patients.

India is soon likely to participate in the WHO's multi-country "solidarity trial" for developing potential treatments for COVID-19, Union Health Ministry officials said on Friday. The priority of the Indian Council of Medical Research in developing drugs is more towards re-purposing&nbsp;molecules instead of creating new ones. The&nbsp;Head of Epidemiology and Communicable diseases at ICMR said that the Department of Biotechnology has been looking into the vaccine development programme. About 30 scientific groups are working on creating a vaccine worldwide, and at least five have started animal trials. India is&nbsp;willing to go for vaccine trials if they pass out on animal study for our population, said experts.&nbsp;

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of plasma from recovered patients to treat people who are critically ill with covid-19, provided that doctors get prior approval. The method has been used in the past to treat diseases such as polio, measles, and mumps, in the 1918 flu epidemic, and in previous outbreaks of respiratory infections similar to Covid-19, according to the BMJ&nbsp;Journal. New York state governor, Andrew Cuomo&nbsp;said that it is a trial to treat people in a serious condition.&nbsp;Plasma from people who have recovered from Covid-19 may contain antibodies to the virus that causes the disease and might be effective against the infection, the FDA said

Indian startups and&nbsp;engineers are joining the fight against the coronavirus pandemic by working on creating&nbsp;low-cost ventilators that could aid the country's medical infrastructure and fill the shortage of ventilators.&nbsp;Bengaluru-based startup, Biodesign Innovations Labs has created&nbsp;a low-cost, portable mechanical ventilation assist device called&nbsp;RespirAid, and is looking to mass&nbsp;manufacture to meet the surge in demand. Two graduates from IIT-Kanpur,&nbsp;who run a start-up called "Nocca Robotics", have also developed a prototype for a portable ventilator. The ventilator can be made at a cost of Rs 70,000 with Indian components, they claim, and they hope to get around 1000 portable ventilators ready within a month.
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Italian researchers at the University of Milan are looking at whether a higher than usual number of cases of severe pneumonia and flu in Lombardy in the last quarter of 2019 could be a signal that the new coronavirus might have spread beyond China earlier than previously thought. Researchers said that&nbsp;here had been a "significant" increase in people hospitalized for pneumonia and flu in Milan and Lodi between October and December last year. The team is now reviewing hospital records and clinical details of those cases.&nbsp;Italy, which has the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in the world, recorded its first case of infection on Feb. 21, though some scientists think that the virus began circulating at least a month earlier.

Addressing a global webinar, Professor&nbsp;Karen Swartz&nbsp;from the Johns Hopkins University shared some quick tips&nbsp;to help people cope with stress and social isolation, calling it the 'new normal'.&nbsp;The virus has also given the world its first infodemic &ndash; an explosion of information on the Internet, but&nbsp;Swartz&nbsp; advices to limit how much we watch the news, go to credible news sources and not read news just before sleeping. Better sleep hygiene, meditation and a daily routine are important, she said.&nbsp;Cultivating healthy mental health during the pandemic requires building resilience. Exercising, moving around and taking up tasks help change negative thoughts to positive, she added.

According to a report by the&nbsp;COV-IND-19 Study Group, India could see about 10 to 13 lakh confirmed cases of the novel&nbsp;coronavirus by mid-May if it continues to spread at its current pace. While the frequency of testing has been very low in India, the accuracy of test results, and the scale of testing of people who may have been exposed but do not show symptoms are also crucial factors.&nbsp;The scientists said that these projections could change as the country conducts more tests and has a better assessment of&nbsp;the number of 'truly affected cases'.&nbsp;
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As the nation sits at home following government orders, a female cop in Bengaluru&nbsp;won hearts on the street. ACP&nbsp;Tabarak&nbsp;Fathima&nbsp;asked people standing nearby to stay indoors. She ended her advice by asking people to join her as she sang a remixed coronavirus-version of the song,&nbsp;'Hum Honge&nbsp;Kammyab.'&nbsp;

Pune-based molecular diagnostics company Mylab Discovery Solutions has received commercial approval from the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation&nbsp;(CDSCO) for its COVID-19 test kit. It is the first ''Made in India'' kit to receive commercial approval from CDSCO. This will help increase the scope of testing in the country. In the current-lab based testing, it takes about four hours for test results to come out, and&nbsp;Mylab's turn around time will be just 2 1/2 hours, reportedly.
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While India seems to have done well in controlling the number of confirmed cases compared to other countries in the early phase of the pandemic, India may see up to 13 lakh cases by mid-May if the numbers keep growing, according to researchers. The Cov-India-19 study group is an interdisciplinary group of scholars and data scientists, who have said the frequency of testing has been very low in India, as only 11,500 subjects have been tested as of March 18. Scientists say India entering phase 2 or phase 3 of escalation will have devastating consequences on the already overstretched healthcare system.

A team of scientists have identified 69 drugs and experimental compounds that may be effective in treating the coronavirus.&nbsp;Some of the medications are already used to treat other diseases, and repurposing them to treat Covid-19 may be faster than trying to invent a new antiviral from scratch, the scientists said.&nbsp;The list of drug candidates appeared in a study published on the website bioRxiv. The researchers have submitted the paper to a journal for publication. Hundreds of researchers&nbsp;embarked on an unusual study of the genes of the coronavirus&nbsp;to identify these drugs.&nbsp;

Scientists from Scripps Research and UC San Diego are looking for Covid-19 survivors who are willing to donate their blood that can be screened for antibodies capable of fighting the novel coronavirus. Antibodies are proteins that help keep people healthy.&nbsp;Antibodies are proteins that help keep people healthy. They identify and attempt to neutralize such things as bacteria and viruses.&nbsp;If the team does get donors, it will screen their blood samples for potentially useful antibodies. It will clone the cells of promising candidates, which will produce lots of research-grade antibodies that can be studied further to develop a vaccine.&nbsp;

More than one billion people have been asked to stay home in over 50 countries and territories around the world as governments battle the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe, according to an AFP tally on Monday. Some countries such as India, France, Italy and Argentina have imposed mandatory lockdown measures, while others like Iran and Britain have issued stay-at-home recommendations to stem the spread of the virus. Governments and health bodies across the globe are looking at social distancing as a crucial means to flatten the curve and contain the spread of the virus.&nbsp;

According to reports, Member of Beijing's expert team on the virus Professor Li Lanjuan&nbsp;has warned of a new&nbsp;coronavirus outbreak in China&nbsp;because of the increasing number of infected people coming in from abroad. In a statement shared with China News, she, reportedly, said that she was&nbsp;worried that imported cases may trigger another epidemic in the country. Officials recently reported China's first case of someone believed to have caught&nbsp;COVID-19, from a person who had been abroad. The news comes as the former epicentre Wuhan is slowly relaxing&nbsp;lockdown rules and returning to normal life.

The constant stream of news about Covid-19&nbsp;can cause panic. Get the facts, not the rumours and misinformation.

Coronavirus 'once-in-a-century' pathogen: Bill Gates

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