Susceptibility and Sustainability of India against CoVid19: a multivariate approach

Soumi Ray; Mitu Roy

The entire world has almost stopped theoretically in the month of March 2020. This is one of the most unexpected and unbelievable situation in world's history. A virus, starting its journey from Wuhan city of China in December 2019, has now reached almost all major cities and has created colonies very rapidly. As per World Health Organization (WHO), the first case of CoVid19 was identified on 8th December 2019 [1] . Initially the disease was misunderstood as some variation of influenza. Scientists, researchers and doctors, after doing continuous analysis, then came up with information about this novel corona virus. Though the drug is not yet in the market, the structural details of the virus are now known to us [2] . Because of its similarities with the behavior of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) corona virus, this virus was named as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease was identified as coronavirus disease (CoVid19) by WHO [3] . Seasonal diseases which have higher mortality rate usually belong to SARS category. Observing the high infection rate, on11th March 2020, WHO declared CoVid19 as pandemic [4] . In 2003, Asian countries were badly affected by SARS epidemic which originated in China. The worldwide death toll was 774, having a ratio of 1:10 of registered cases [5] . In 1957, Asian flu virus claimed around thousand lives in India [6] . One of the severest global pandemic in the history of recent past was 1918 flu. This flu was first reported in a Spanish newspaper, and it infiltrated India through Bombay port. The disease was contagious. It claimed 400 million lives worldwide [7] . It is claimed that one third of the population was infected. Different articles claimed China as the origin of the flu [8] [9] [10] . But death in China itself was very few, whereas India lost almost one fifth of its population [11] . The estimated death toll was 14 million [12] . The flu was so deadly, that it brought the population down for first time as well as the last time, till date in the history of India. But the virus disappeared almost suddenly after few months. It is assumed that like any other pathogen, this virus also rapidly mutated to a lesser lethal strain and then finally died out [5] .