 I am Dr. Hemant Kalyan. In this video, I am going to talk about a subject which has captured the world's attention, COVID-19. What it is, how it gets transmitted and what we can do to prevent it. COVID-19 is the name of a disease caused by a virus called SARS-CoV-2. It is transmitted from one human being who is infected to another by way of droplets. Droplets are tiny particles of saliva which are produced during normal activities like talking and laughing. If you sneeze or talk loudly or shout or sing or cough, those droplets will travel further and with greater velocity and if you are infected they will carry a higher load of viruses and go further. Now imagine that you are in the presence of a person who is infected and inhaling those droplets which that person is exhaling. The closer you are to the person and the more unprotected you are, it makes sense that and the longer time you spend with a person, it makes sense that you are going to have a higher load of those droplets in your system. That is a higher viral load which substantially increases your chance of getting an infection from the infected person. Here comes the importance of social distancing. Social distancing or physical distancing that is standing 2 meters or 6 feet apart from the individual will protect you in more ways than you think because a droplets that the person exhales would not reach you under normal circumstances because they won't travel that distance. The other crucial point of protection is wearing a mask. If the person who is infected is wearing a mask and the person who is at the other end is also wearing a mask two people wearing masks talking to each other at normal volume, normal conversational volume would have less than 1.5% chance of infection getting transmitted from the infected person to the other person. This is because the mask will act as a simple physical barrier and a filter which will prevent those virus particles from the droplets from going far. If you want to add on a further level of protection, you could use an eye shield or a face shield because the eyes are another source from which the patient can transmit the infection to you or you can receive infection from the patient. The other important route of transmission is by formites. Now let us say you are having dinner with an infected person at the same dining table. Obviously you can't wear a mask. The person is talking a little bit while eating and those droplets are falling on the surface of the dining table, maybe on your glass. You pick up the glass and you drink it. You put your hand on the table and then touch your face or your mouth and in that way you are transferring those droplets which contain the infected virus into yourself and thereby exposing yourself to the chance of infection. What do you do here? The simple act of washing hands frequently with soap and water for 20 seconds as has been prescribed will kill most of the viruses that you pick up from formites like in the situation that I described. Now in a situation where you can wear a mask, wearing a mask itself will completely minimize the number of formites that are being transmitted around and thereby reduce the chance of infection transmission. So by simple low-cost measures, SMS, sanitization that is hand washing, mask wearing, M and social distancing, SMS is the mantra that you and I can adopt to help each other and to save lives and save costs and save anxiety and save a lot of angst for our families.