Pharma Wrap: Why The Rise In Cured Covid-19 People Raises Hope

In the times of a pandemic, most of us are keeping a track on the number of positive COVID-19 cases but the other figure we often tend to ignore is the number of people who have recovered from the deadly infection.

According to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), as on April 19, India has 12,974 active cases and 507 deaths. Meanwhile, 2,230 have been cured or discharged.

The interesting aspect is that the number of people who were cured or discharged from COVID-19 doubled in the last five days. In contrast, the number of positive cases and deaths doubled in the last eight days.

To defeat the pandemic effectively, the rate of recovery should increase while the number of cases drops.

In Kerala for example, the number of recovered cases has now surpassed active cases by a huge margin. Kerala reported 400 positive cases of which 257 have recovered and three have died.

The people who have recovered can be of great help for purpose of understanding of how people can build immunity against the virus, the recovered people can donate their plasma to other COVID patients in helping them fight the virus and more importantly, they can resume normal life out of lockdown.

Who is considered recovered?

US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has developed criteria to determine who have recovered from COVID-19 and leave isolation.

For people without testing, they have had no fever for at least three full days without the use of medicine, other symptoms cough or shortness of breath have improved and at least seven days have passed since symptoms first appeared.

In case of people having access to testing, they should test negative in two tests in a row, 24 hours apart, no longer have a fever without the use of medicine and other symptoms also improve.-Money Control