Health/Medicine

New Delhi, Jan 17 (IANS) A doctor of internal medicine at a private hospital has said that uncertainty about the symptoms of coronavirus infection and lack of accurate information on the disease led to panic among the people about the virus.

"In absence of accurate information about COVID-19 symptoms, communication channels could not spread the right message to the common people, which resulted in panic among them," Dr Shushila Kataria, Director and Head of Internal Medicine Department at Medanta, said at a webinar on Saturday.

Talking about the treatment process, she said; "As every recipe follows a particular protocol, similarly the treatment for COVID-19 required a particular protocol to follow and then keep adding more to it step by step."

"For Covid-19 treatment, the protocol starts with finding its symptoms at the initial stage. Diagnosing the symptoms of COVID-19 is a main process of treatment because the more quickly we find them, the more quickly we can proceed further. But the problem is that in most cases, symptoms are found at least after one or two weeks. And that is why common people have this tendency that they can escape COVID-19 if they remain away from other people and isolate themselves."

Kataria said that the second aspect of treatment was to find if the symptoms were serious or not. "Once the coroanvirus symptoms are determined, a doctor finds it easy to decide whether a particular patient requires home isolation or hospitalisation," Dr Kataria added.

She lauded the central government for taking quick decisions on directions for home isolation and thereby allowing patients to remain confined in their homes. "Doing this not only reduced the burden on health centres, but also helped doctors carry out treatment on patients as per beds available in their hospitals. It also helped health institutions to augment the required facilities for the next course of treatment process."