IMPORTANT FACTS ON COVID-19

1.    PRADHAN MANTRI GARIB KALYAN PACKAGE

·         Insurance cover of ₹ 50 Lakh per health worker fighting COVID-19 to be provided under Insurance Scheme. Health workers including safai karmachari, nurses, technicians, doctors, ASHA workers, paramedics, etc.

·        80 crore poor people will get 5 kg wheat or rice and 1 kg of preferred pulses for free per month for successive three months.

·         20 crore women Jan Dhan account holders to get ₹ 500 per month for next three months.

·         Increase in MNREGA wage to ₹ 202 a day from ₹ 182 to benefit 13.62 crore families.

·         An ex-gratia of ₹ 1,000 to 3 crore poor senior citizen, poor widows and poor disabled.

·         Government to front-load ₹ 2,000 paid to farmers in first week of April under existing PM Kisan Yojana to benefit 8.7 crore farmers.

·          Central Government has passed various orders so that State Governments uses Building and Construction Workers Welfare Fund to provide relief to the various laborers and Construction Workers.

2.    PREVENT YOURSELF FROM HACKERS

Now you have to be more careful with your data besides protecting yourself from coronavirus. Many hackers are taking the advantage of the panic of the common people to get into their personal details purporting in the name of providing details on coronavirus.

·         Hackers are now sending various spam mails with various malicious attachments which when opened, these virus start infecting your system resulting of being hacked.

·         Mails being sent from various legitimate health organizations should also not be opened even of WHO. They may be sent from various hackers purporting to be from the various health organizations giving information about CORONAVIRUS. These mails may infect your system with your various types of virus or malwares and your top private data can be leaked.

·         Hackers are not even leaving the dutiful taxpayers. Financially motivated attackers are taking this crisis as an advantage. Various malicious websites and ads are being created to attract the unsuspicious users to use it. They may even give some attractive cashback offers and thus traps the users and may take essential credential details.

·          According to a leading cyber security solutions firm Check Point, an attack by a Chinese APT group targeted a public sector entity of Mongolia. Dubbed ‘Vicious Panda’, the group sent out two ‘press briefings’ purported to be from the Foreign Affairs Ministry of Mongolia. Each of the attachments carried a custom remote access malware, which was quite difficult to detect.

·         Fake emails are also being sent from the unknown sources purporting to be from the doctors giving information about the vaccines. This mail may be fake and shouldn’t be opened at all. Furthermore the popular COVID-19 map which is maintained by Johns Hopkins University, have also been targeted by the hackers. A fake email from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is attempting to lure people into clicking malware-laced links. The signature and address used here are not looked to be suspicious.

So you have to be more careful during these quarantine period. Because during this STAY HOME PERIOD access to internet has risen by 50× so the hacker can attack or target you. So you have to be very careful about this.

3.    SCITECH ARION AIR PURIFIER CAN KILL ALL VIRUSES, INCLUDING CORONA

    Yes it is true. SCITECH ARION AIR PURIFIER can kill all types of virus, including novel corona. The working of it is based on the generation of negatively charged ions in a massive amount (approx... 10 crore ions per second). This negatively charged ions attracts the positively charged air-borne like mold, corona, influenza viruses, bacteria, pollens etc. and clusters around them and render them inactive by chemical reactions by creating highly reactive OH group called hydroxyl groups AND H₂O₂ which are highly reactive and are known as atmospheric detergents. One hour of operation of the ion generator machine would reduce viral load within a room by 99.7% varying upon the room size. Soon thousands of such machine would be available in the market.

4.    DON’T USE THESE WEBSITES FOR CORONA UPDATES

      With the increase in number of days of quarantine, people are getting worried and they are continuously searching on the web about coronavirus and the methods to protect themselves and their family from this virus. On the other hand, hackers are taking this as their own advantage in order to create malicious websites purporting to give corona updates. Many of the domain names are fake.  It is important to strictly avoid these websites.

            The list of domain names was issued by DCP Cybercrime on its twitter handle. They are:

·         coronavirusstatus[.]space

·         coronavirus-map[.]com

·         blogcoronacl.canalcero[.]digital

·         coronavirus[.]zone

·         coronavirus-realtime[.]com

·         coronavirus[.]app

·         bgvfr.coronavirusaware[.]xyz

·         oronavirusaware[.]xyz

·         corona-virus[.]healthcare

·         survivecoronavirus[.]org

·         vaccine-coronavirus [.]com

·         coronavirus[.]cc

·         bestcoronavirusprotect[.]tk

·         coronavirusupdate[.]tk

It's important that people stick to genuine media websites and official government accounts for any update on coronavirus pandemic as a lot of fake news is being spread around the virus outbreak.

5.    DRDO DEVELOPS MOBILE VIROLOGY RESEARCH LABORATORY

·         The defense minister Rajnath Singh inaugurated the MBVRL (Mobile virology research laboratory) which has been made by DRDO collaborated with ESIC College & Hospital, Hyderabad with 3 private companies.

·         The mobile lab will carry out diagnosis of COVID-19 and in virus-culturing for drug screening, convalescent (person recovering from illness) plasma-derived therapy, comprehensive immune profiling (Immune profiling involves the analysis of T- and B-cell receptors (TCRs/BCRs), which allow cells to bind specific antigens, proliferate, and then rapidly mount a specific immune response) of patients towards vaccine development and early clinical trials specific to Indian population.

·         The MVRDL is the combination of a bio-safety level BSL-3 lab and a BSL-2 lab and was set up in a record time of 15 days. It can process 1,000-2,000 samples a day. It can be placed anywhere in the country.

·         It has been designed by following the guidelines of WHO and ICMR. It meet the international guidelines and standards.

6.     NASA DEVELOPS HIGH PRESSURE VENTILATOR TO FIGHT COVID-19

Although NASA engineers are specialized in spaceships, but they thought it as their responsible to be beside the world. With the help of the medical team, they developed high-pressure ventilator for COVID-19 patients. The device, called VITAL (Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally), passed a critical test and is seeking an FDA approval for the device via an emergency. There is a huge number of shortage of ventilators in America and apparently ion the whole world. Thus, this new-easy-to-build ventilator will obviously help USA but will also help the whole world during this pandemic time of COVID-19.

7.    IITs ARE STEPPING FORWARD TO WIN THIS WAR

IIT Kanpur are constantly testing vaccine against COVID-19 while researchers at Madras and Kanpur have built drones for surveillance and IIT Ropar has produced robots to deliver food and medicines to patients in hospitals and quarantine zones. These innovations are in various stages of development. Other products include low-cost hazmat suits, real-time Covid-19 testing devices, ventilators, PCR machines, body suits for patients, self-inflating bags for automated ventilators, telemedicine and large-scale production of recombinant proteins for vaccines and testing and rapid diagnostic kits developed by the Kharagpur and Delhi IITs.

      Nation’s top engineering colleges have started preparing masks and also various types of sanitizers. IIT Ropar is designing a negative pressure room to prevent the spread of the disease through the air in isolation wards and testing labs. This will protect the medical staff from getting infected. The institute has prepared a device based on UV germicidal irradiation technology to sanitize groceries and milk.

      IIT Kanpur researchers have developed a low-cost ventilator that uses local components and are also designing a machine that will generate oxygen from the atmosphere. The advantage will be that oxygen need not be stored and carried around in cylinders, which are expensive and in limited supply.

8.     ONLY NEEDS 5 SECOND TO IDENTIFY COVID-19 POSITIVE PATIENTS

An IIT ROORKEE professor claims that he has developed a software which can identify patients whether infected by COVID-19 virus or not within 5 seconds. Kamal Jain, a professor of civil engineering department claims that it will not only reduce the testing cost but also reduce the transmission of the virus. The doctor has to simply upload the picture of the X-Ray scan and the software will not only classify whether the patient is having pneumonia or not but it will also state that it was due to COVID-19 virus or for any other bacteria. Besides it can also measure the severity condition of the patient.

9.    WIRELESS UVC SANITIZATION

MARRI LAXMAN REDDY INSTITUTE OF TCHNOLOGY AND MANAGEMENT has developed a low-cost cloud based WIRELESS UVC SANITIZATION system which will help to strengthen the fight against coronavirus. The solution will fight against the coronavirus and will put a heavy impact on this virus. It will help in disinfecting the larger areas in shorter time like hospital, public transports, and commercial buildings. This type of sanitization process in automatic and effective by killing bacteria, mold, spores.

      Furthermore the student of MARRI LAXMAN INSTITUTE has developed a 3-D printed mask shield which is much similar to that of a welder’s mask. This will provide extra protection to the COVID-19 warriors like doctors, health workers, polices, volunteers. These shields will function as an extra protection for their face masks. These face shields can be worn over regular mask.

10.                      INDIA PLAYING A MAJOR ROLE IN PREPRATION OF VACCINE

SERUM INSTITUTE of INDIA is playing a major role in being a manufacturing partner of Oxford University for COVID-19 vaccine. Scientists at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, US, has already tested the vaccine, ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 on 6 Rhesus monkey. First they have injected the monkeys with the vaccine and then heavy load of coronavirus has been injected inside their body and found them to be healthy.

            SERUM INSTITUTE of INDIA, the largest vaccine producer of the world, along with 7 other worldwide vaccine producer companies have collaborated with Oxford University to prepare vaccines. Serum Institute of India, chief executive officer Adar Poonawalla had already told that once the trial on the humans of the vaccine becomes successful they will immediately start preparing the vaccine doses and the vaccine doses may be available by September-October. They are taking initiative to prepare about 4-5 million doses per month which may scale up, to 10 million doses. About 20-40 million doses are expected to be ready by September-October.

11.                      PGI CHANDIGARH STEPPED AHEAD IN THIS VIRUS WAR

PGI Chandigarh found an alternative medicine for corona. Mycovacterium W (MW) vaccine which is given to leprosy patients, have been tried by the doctors of PGI Chandigarh on COVID-19 patients. This trial have given them a fruitful result. Those 6 COVID-19 positive patients over whom these vaccines have been tested, have got cured with no short-term side effects. Those 6 patients who required oxygen during the treatment, have been given 0.3ml of MW Vaccine for 3 consecutive tests. Now those patient are absolutely safe. PGI Chandigarh along with AIIMS-Bhopal and AIIMS-Delhi has planned human trial on the effectiveness of MW Vaccine on coronavirus patient. But the doctors are not referring this MW medicine as a vaccine for coronavirus. It is too early to refer MW as a vaccine for coronavirus patient. But, it can obviously be used by other doctors to treat on COVID-19 positive patients. MW drug is used for treating leprosy along with tuberculosis and pneumonia earlier and now it is effective on coronavirus positive patient.