AA Edit | HMPV: No need to panic
By : AsianAge
Update: 2025-01-06 18:42 GMT
The news that was dreaded about the incidence of the Human Metapneumovirus (HMPV) in India has come. It was bound to, considering the virus may already have been existing without the medical fraternity and the people being unduly worried about it as the virus has been known to be most prevalent during the winter and early spring months and that it causes flu-like symptoms.
It is the background of the global pandemic of 2020 caused by the Covid-19 virus, which may have come out of an animal market in Wuhan in China or a laboratory in the same city, that the news is being received with various levels of shock. So little was known of the Covid-19 virus that the world was in the grip of absolute panic when it first began spreading in India.
Two babies in Karnataka, diagnosed in private medical laboratories as infected with the virus, are said to be recovering and that must come as a matter of early relief. The medical world is convinced that the HMPV is not a killer of the same ferocity as Covid-19 and that very young children and the elderly may be more likely to contract it. Also, doctors aver that children will quickly build an immunity to it and that there is no reason to spread the kind of alarm that gripped the world five years ago.
Is it time for the world to pull out the masks to keep the personal respiratory system somewhat away from the dangers of the world of today in which viruses travel as quickly as rumours? While high risk groups might be advised caution about touching surfaces or going near infected people, the time is not such that society must have to shut down as it did in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The panic-spreading videos out of Chinese hospitals that have triggered the latest round of global anxiety have also been explained. It is winter in the northern hemisphere which is when influenza, cold, fever and respiratory illnesses are very common. Some countries are in the grip of a ‘quadremic’ with a rise in cases of four winter viruses, each capable of attacking at the same time.
Do not panic would be the best advice anyone can give even in the aftermath of the global pandemic that wrought such havoc in ’20 and ’21. And don’t worry about the stock market whose indices will yo-yo as much with bad news as with the good. It might be safe to conclude that rising numbers of people with respiratory problems is not to be equated with the dangers of Covid-19 mortality rates.