COMMENT | When can we go out again?

COMMENT | The coronavirus has spread so fast it has brought the medical facilities in developed countries like the United States, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom to their knees. It has pushed stable places like Australia and Switzerland into the state of emergencies. It has fundamentally changed the order of the world.

An expert predicted that this virus could affect 20 to 60 percent of the world’s population in the end.

To know how contagious coronavirus is, we need to look at its R0 number. This is called the “basic reproduction number”.

A fast virus

The current R0 of coronavirus is 2 to 2.5. This means that if one infected person spreads the virus to one or two other persons, after 10 rounds, we would have around 2,047 people infected. Coupled by the lack of vaccine and the lack of obvious symptoms, coronavirus spreads faster than we can contain.

We used to think that you need to twin symptoms of high fever and cough to have the virus, then it became enough just to have flu-like symptoms. Later we learned that any loss of sense of smell or taste is sufficient. Now, we learn that it may be possible for the virus to travel through vapour in our breaths.

Coronavirus could also be without any symptoms. Any precaution taken yesterday is already unusable today.