 So over the last few weeks, the news of coronavirus is kind of hard to escape. I've been asked by patients, by family members, by social media. And so in this video, I'm going to break it down as a physician on what the truth is, how concerned should we be and what type of things you should know. All right, guys, what is going on in log shape and MD journey? If you are new to this channel, I'm a first year internal medicine resident. And this video, I really wanted to talk about the outbreak, the hysteria that's caused by coronavirus. I wanted to give you guys an insight from a physician's standpoint of what this is, you know, if you're unfamiliar, how concerned we should be, what type of things you should know to help obviously protect yourself as well as your family. But to give you a little bit of a background, the current corona outbreak kind of started in late 2019, early 2020, with initial cases being reported in the city of Wuhan, China. Now, the important thing to remember is that the coronavirus itself, similar to influenza virus, has been around for quite some time in human history. And we've been testing people for several years on this. It's just that the current strain, which is now called COVID-19, because the outbreak started in 2019, is really what's causing the outbreaks and the epidemic that's been going on in the world. Now, after the initial cases of COVID-19, it's quickly and rapidly spread through areas of China, Asia, Europe, and now North and South America. And as the making of this video, there have been reported over 120,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 4,000 plus deaths related to the virus. Now that we talked about a little bit of the background of the epidemic, I want to talk more about kind of how this virus behaves and whether or not you should be concerned and what type of things you should be able to look at for. So the first thing we should talk about is how the coronavirus is spread in the first place. And actually, it's quite similar to the influenza virus is that it spreads through respiratory droplets. So that includes things like coughing and sneezing and then being in contact with somebody or something that they've touched through those respiratory droplets. So the next question that people often ask is, well, if you're exposed, you know, how quickly should you expect to see symptoms and have it resolve? That's a really good question. And when they've studied that, they found that within about four to five days, a medium amount of people are starting to experience some kind of symptoms with the upper epsilon kind of extremes being about 14 days. That's where the 14 day incubation period comes from, where you may be seeing government institutions doing this, as well as individuals self-quarantine themselves for 14 days to kind of help reduce the spread from person to person. And then obviously, the next question that people are going to ask is what symptoms should I be looking out for in myself and my family members and others that I'm interacting with, as well as patients that I may be taken care of? And unfortunately, like any viral infection, the symptoms are pretty nonspecific. So a lot of patients with coronavirus or COVID-19 will experience fever, which is very common fatigue, as well as a tricaw. But those kinds of symptoms can obviously be related to other kinds of illnesses. So it's just not a telltale sign. In fact, if you look at the infamous case of the coronavirus outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise line, you can see that out of the crew members, as well as the guests on the ship, over 600 cases were confirmed through tests, but only about half of them were symptomatic in some form or fashion. That's pretty typical for the direction of coronavirus. So again, if you look at 120,000 cases confirmed, about 60 plus thousand patients have recovered in some form or fashion. There are patient populations that are at higher concern for complications from coronavirus. This includes people who are older, people who have weaker immune systems, such as individuals with cancer and getting certain treatments, such as chemotherapy, as well as people who are predisposed to getting respiratory illnesses. These are individuals who get really sick, who will require ICU level care and may require intubation for ventilatory support. And while it's important to remember, it's also important to understand that this kind of complication can arise from any type of viral or bacterial infection. So it's not just specifically related to coronavirus. In fact, when you look at the current mortality rate, which is right now 3.5 percent at the scale of billions is impacting a lot of people, both confirmed as well as fatalities. You can argue that the number is still a little higher than the true value. That's because there's individuals who haven't been tested for COVID-19, who are walking around either asymptomatic or with mild symptoms. So there's people around who are asymptomatic with either a history or with current coronavirus that may just not be reported. And if you look at areas such as the United States, where the CDC and the government institution is basically deciding who gets tested, who doesn't, based off of certain criterias, you could argue there's people that are walking around with COVID-19 that just simply won't already get tested. So mortality rates probably lower because the complications may not be as prevalent in those patients. So next I want to talk about kind of wrapping up this video on basically how we diagnose coronavirus, how we prevent it, how we treat it, as well as future directions that we're going into. So in terms of kind of how we diagnose it right now, especially in institutions in areas like the United States, it's kind of on a criteria to criteria, individual to individual basis. You have to meet a certain amount of criterias. And the majority of them being, have you been an exposure to somebody who has had coronavirus or have you been in an area that's possibly been endemic for the virus itself? And if you do get tested, the test is a simple swab of your nose as well as your mouth or a collection of sputum that they can then send out and do a different test called a PCR, which basically examines whether or not you have the strain of COVID-19. And if somebody was to test positive for coronavirus, the next step so we would take is to one make sure that their exposure to other people is limited since we know the virus can basically be incubated for about up to 14 days, but also symptomatic management. Currently, we don't have any treatment or vaccines that we can give somebody. So it's just making sure that we're controlling their fevers as far as the symptoms. And with the question of prevention always comes the question of do I need to buy more masks? My answer is no. If you're just walking around your community, the chances that the mask is going to protect you from limiting coronavirus is pretty low. If you are somebody, however, who is at a high likelihood of being exposed to somebody with coronavirus such as a health care worker and just being on a lookout for the symptoms such as a fever, a cough, which would just make you at least want to put a mask around those kinds of patients. But for a majority of the population doing things such as washing your hands as well as avoiding touching your face is probably going to do much more than a mask is going to be able to help with. And briefly to wrap up this video, I want to talk about things such as future directions, things such as forms of treatment like vaccines and kind of what to expect. In regards to vaccine, we have to understand that even those scientists and governments and companies are working at accelerated rate to get a vaccine to the public. It still takes some time for that to actually happen. So on the span of closer to a year than actually weeks to months. But in the meantime, isolations from large group interactions are going to be more and more a problem both on a local as well as a natural scale. In terms of future prediction, unfortunately, we're going to be a little bit and unknown. You're more than likely to see this impact your community if you haven't already. The thing is, is that because we're so well connected with the power of our cell phone, the power of social media that the hysteria, unfortunately, of coronavirus is probably going to outpace the actual growth of the virus. More and more people are going to be breaking out and taking traumatic steps. And then unfortunately it may cause more than a safe amount of concern that we should have for this virus. But that guys is basically my breakdown of the coronavirus outbreak. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it. If you guys have any more questions or if I made a mistake and you want to just go ahead and let me know about correction, go ahead and comment down below. If you guys did enjoy this video, then go ahead and definitely consider giving it a like. If you want more videos just like this on a weekly basis, then make sure don't forget to hit that subscribe button. But thank you guys so much for being a part of my journey. Hopefully I've been a little help to you on yours. See you guys in the next one. Peace.