FAQ ABOUT COVID-19

BY Dr. Sanjiva Wijesinha

With Sri Lanka slowly recovering from its fourth wave of COVID-19, I have grown accustomed to being accosted by friends, acquaintances and patients who begin their conversation with: ‘What I still can’t understand about this whole pandemic business is…’

To answer some commonly asked questions about COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2, let me summarise the basic facts about this disease and the virus that causes it.

Coronaviruses are a type of virus that can infect human beings. There are many types of coronavirus; and some viruses that belong to this large family of pathogens are responsible for causing the common cold and influenza among other diseases.

COVID-19 refers to a virulent type of coronavirus in this group and is a virus that can cause very serious illness if it manages to enter your system – especially the lungs. It spreads easily from an infected person to close contacts; and if the virus travels down your airways into the lungs, it can cause life-threatening damage.

You can contract COVID-19 if someone who already has the virus in their airways coughs or sneezes, or simply by breathing into the air of those pathogens, which you subsequently inhale. Therefore, close contact with someone who has contracted COVID-19 makes you vulnerable to catching the disease from them.

Taking two or three doses of COVID-19 vaccines provide protection because the inoculation stimulates your white cells and increases the number of antibodies that fight invading viruses.

These antibodies become programmed so that if the COVID-19 virus manages to enter your throat through the air you inhale, your body’s ‘prepared defences’ can destroy the pathogen before it reaches your lungs and causes harm.

If you’re vaccinated, and maintain a safe distance between yourself and anyone who is infected with COVID-19, it’s very unlikely that the virus will enter your throat and even less likely it’ll reach the lungs.

And if you have been inoculated and still become infected with COVID-19, it is extremely unlikely that the virus will travel far enough along your respiratory tract and have the opportunity to damage your lungs.

Symptoms that a person who becomes ill with COVID-19 exhibits when the virus has invaded their lungs include acute body pains, and the sensation of weakness, fever, severe coughing and breathlessness.

When medics test a person who is suspected of having contracted COVID-19, they use a swab to take a sample from the throat to check if he or she has germs in it.

Such testing can be done either by doing a rapid antigen test (RAT), which produces a result almost immediately but can’t be considered 100 percent accurate, or a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test that is more accurate but takes at least six hours – or sometimes longer – to deliver a verdict.

If your test comes back negative, you can assume for all practical purposes that there are no COVID-19 germs in your throat.
But keep in mind that even if you’ve tested negative for the COVID-19 virus but feel unwell, you should rest, eat sensibly and take paracetamol or aspirin – particularly if you have a mild fever or headache.