Why India Seems To Be More Immune To The Coronavirus

The Coronavirus shows no sign of stopping as the infected number has reached 90,000 and the 3,313 lives have been claimed.

China, Iran, and Italy are the countries with the largest number of patients but in India, there are only six cases reported in New Delhi, Kerala, Jaipur, and Telangana.

Many are worrying that the country’s dense population and large internal migration can make matter worse. However, some experts believe the opposite. They claimed that India’s warm climate and humid weather can be the country’s secret weapon against the Coronavirus.

According to Dr. KK Agarwal, Indian Medical Association’s former president, COVID-19 spreads fast in Southeast Asian countries where the weather is cooler than that of India. While China and South Korea are struggling to contain the outbreak, the virus development in India seems to be slower.

He backed his claim by saying that pandemics like Ebola, SARS, and yellow fever had had a less severe impact on the country. However, Dr. KK Agarwal had to admit that there was a possibility that the infection might be happening without the Indian authority knowing about it.

As stated by Arindam Biswas, a medical consultant, there were three factors that determine how fast a virus infects people, the environment, the host, and the agent of the virus itself.

In India, we have two out of these three factors, hosts and the virus, but it is possible that COVID-19 does not have the ideal environment to spread. He said that Indian citizens’ awareness and taking preventative measures might have helped India avoids a huge outbreak, but we should not roll out the possibility that the pandemic is spreading somewhere we do not know about.

While heat is something India has plenty of and the story might be comforting, we do not have enough scientific evidence to be 100% sure about the theory.

One of the Coronavirus can infect another person is through droplets of body fluids from an infected host. In a study published in 2007, researchers pointed out that a high humidity level can limit the range of these droplets, thus restrict the virus from spreading.

Another theory suggests that since people tend to be further away from each other when it is hot, but experts are still skeptical about the whole the hotter weather, the fewer viruses theory.

According to Dr. Nancy Messionnier of the CDC, it is still too soon to conclude that people in hotter areas are safe against the virus. Scientists are not sure if similar viruses that cause MERS and SARS are season-related and whether COVID-19 has similar behavior.

Experts warn that even if the virus slows down in hot weather, it will probably be back when the temperature drops and cause another outbreak as people have given up on all of the protective measures like wearing face masks or washing their hands regularly.

So health officials and policymakers should not rely entirely on the warm weather of India and lose guard. For now, our best practices are level-headed policies and public health preparedness, as well as better treatment for those who have fallen ill of the Coronavirus.

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