Over the last 70 years, scientists have found that Coronavirus can infect mice, rats, dogs, cats, turkeys, horses, pigs, and cattle. Sometimes, these animals can transmit Coronavirus to humans as well.

Coronavirus was identified on January 7 and has been named as COVID-19, where “Co” and “Vi” is for Coronavirus, “d” for disease, and “19” for the year when the disease emerged.

It has not been previously identified in humans and little is known about it, although human-to-human transmission has been confirmed.

One analysis has found that the genetic sequence of the new virus is 96 per cent identical to one Coronavirus found in bats.

According to WHO, Coronavirus are a family of viruses that cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases.

The virus was originally transmitted between animals and people.

Where did the Coronavirus originate?

Coronavirus originated in China in early December. The first outbreak was at a meat market in Wuhan, China. According to research, the first 41 people who were infected had some connection to the meat market.

In early February, researchers in Guangzhou, China, suggested that Pangolins could be the possible source of the disease based on the genetic comparison of the virus found in human and an-eating animals.

Most of the deaths that have been in this outbreak are older with chronic health issues like, heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes. In that group, the fatality rate for the Coronavirus is much higher. It’s around 14-15% for the elderly people.

What are the symptoms of Coronavirus?

The symptoms of Coronavirus can include coughing, fever, and shortness of breath. Due to the incubation period, symptoms may not appear in the initial 2-14 days after the exposure. Most people show symptoms within five to six days. And symptoms of COVID-19 do not include runny nose, health experts at the WHO have clarified.

In severe cases, it can lead to pneumonia, multiple organ failure, and even death.

Here are the symptoms:

• Sneezing
• Fatigue
• Fever
• Cough
• Sore Throat
• Exacerbated Asthma

How many have been infected?

The total contagions in China reported around 81,000 cases with 3,305 deaths. The deaths caused by COVID-19 have surpassed that of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that occurred in 2002 and 2003. Officials have implemented measures to contain the virus, including travel restrictions and quarantines.

The countries that are hit by this pandemic have declared lockdown and those found with symptoms have been quarantined or put into isolation.

Overall cases of Coronavirus has come up around 872,972 with deaths up to 43,275 and 184,594 have been recovered as per the data available while preparing this article.

How the virus is getting transmitted?

There is limited research on how COVID-19 is spreading from one person to person. Some researchers are of belief that this virus transmit via fluids in the respiratory system, such as mucus.

Coronavirus can spread in the following ways:

• Coughing and sneezing without covering the mouth can disperse droplets into the air.
• Touching or shaking the hands with a person who has the virus can pass the virus between individuals.
• Touching your nose, eyes or mouth after coming in contact with an infected person.

Where have cases been reported?

Most cases and deaths have been reported in China, mostly in the Hubei province. Deaths have also been confirmed in Hong Kong, Italy, Philippines, Japan, France, Taiwan, India, Italy, and Iran.

The virus has spread into various countries in the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, North America, The Middle East, and Africa.

However, China has been recovered a lot from the COVID-19 and has spread to more other countries. But there are some more cases in China that have come up again.

What Precautions can you take?

There is no any specific vaccine that can treat it as it’s a new strain. However, WHO has come up with several protection measures that you can take to prevent the virus.

Based on research, there are some precautions and measures that you can take to protect yourself from Coronavirus are:

• Wash your hands
• Cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze
• Stay away from people who are ill
• Drinking enough water
• Avoiding smoking and smoky areas
• Wear a mask whenever you go outside
• Taking ibuprofen or naproxen for pain and fever
• Using a Clean Humidifier
• Stay home from work or school if you are not feeling well
• If you are in old age and have a chronic health condition. Try to stay away from the crowded place and postpone any unnecessary travel.
• If you have a kid, wear a mask whenever you come in contact with the kid and wash your hands and keep your kid sanitized all the time. Kids and old age people are more susceptible to this disease.

What steps have been taken to check its spread?

The Chinese government initially locked down Wuhan, the epicentre of the virus outbreak, however, it was too late as many people died and were infected. All the countries have expanded the screening of international travellers. And the travellers found with the flu have been isolated and treated before their release.

References:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/23/21078457/coronavirus-outbreak-china-wuhan-quarantine-who-sars-cdc-symptoms-risk
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
http://www.economictimes.indiatimes.com
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com

The post Everything you need to Know about Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) appeared first on Amazing Things.

If you’re the type of person who the first thing they do in the morning is to read the news, you know how hard it can be to know which media outlet you can trust. I personally start checking multiple sources every time there’s a piece of news I believe is important. But, it is quite time-consuming, at least until you build a personal library of different news sources and even then, you still need to check if they actually wrote about the topic you want to check.

This made me start researching if there’s an easier, more tech-savvy way to read news from multiple sources. I started looking for possible apps to help with this problem and as it turned out, there are numerous apps that do just that. So if you’re facing the same problem as me, I present my personal top 3 apps for reading news from multiple sources.

SmartNews – All News in One Place

SmartNews is the first one I tried, and I got to say, I liked it from the get-go. Mainly for its user interface, but later for the way it delivers the news to you. It doesn’t filter according to what you read, but it provides different sources. More importantly, the news outlets the app provides aren’t any websites, but recognized websites you probably know. The app shines in organizing the news for you so you can focus more on reading, rather than researching. Also, I noticed they update several times as a day. I can appreciate that as I have the peace of mind I get the latest info on which I can create opinions.

In case you’re into politics, I did notice more news feed leaning more to the left. Although the reason for that is probably the fact we have more popular left-oriented news sites than right. Still, I do appreciate the fact you can easily organize as you wish and have yourself decide what you want to read.

Reuters News – Different Sources of Video News

Although the app does come with regular articles as well, the main thing I like the most are the videos. Video news is snappy, on the point and they try to take as less of your time as possible without sacrificing the quality. I’d say it’s a great app for people who are busy but still value to get different points of view. I found myself mostly using the app like this. I’d watch the video news in the morning and if an article caught my eye, I’d save it for a later read. The favorite tab is easy to access so you are easily reminded that you have something saved for the later. Overall, it’s the small thing that matter and I learned to appreciate this one.

But, although the app comes with clever features, I was a bit disappointed by the number of news categories. The way it’s organized seems a bit too general for my liking as I often found myself browsing the world news to find something extremely specific.  Yes, there’s is the ability to search, but it seems a better organization of articles could easily make the app even better.

News Break – Everything Local

Finally, I’d recommend News Break to people more interested in the news about their local area, rather than the general world news. It took me around 3 minutes to customize the app so I get only the news I want and in case I want to check something different, all I have to do is go to the home screen. Another great thing is the way you can save articles. If you like to read many articles but lack the time, the app lets you customize the saved ones in many different ways. This way, you can keep everything well organized and ensure you actually read what you saved for later.

One thing I should mention, they use fewer sources than SmartNews for example. There are some low-quality articles I stumbled, but you can easily filter out and ensure you don’t get it in the future. Still, as far as the local news goes, I definitely like this one.

Conclusion

These are my top picks for apps that help you get as much diverse news as possible. It’s hard to satisfy everyone’s taste, especially when it comes to news, so it’s always important to have more than one source. The same goes for apps. Although I do think these are the best, I’ll share a website I found that lists top 10 most popular news apps you can check out. Just in case you want more choices.

Best 10 Apps for Daily News

This way, I think we have more than enough possibilities to know we’re actually getting the real information. As I said in the introduction, today more than ever it’s important we double-check the information we get and if we can use apps to do that, why not? Good luck and stay smart.

This is a guest post by Margaret Jules to our site. All views & words are her personal.

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Traditionally, researchers relied on sources like the World Bank, NASA, ProPublica, Kaggle (search engine). Now, the Dataset Search will make the researchers’ work much easier.

The purpose of this tool is also to improve discovery of datasets from fields such as social sciences, machine learning, life sciences, civic and government data, and many more.

To know what can comprise a dataset, here are a few examples:

1. An organized collection of tables
2. A file in a proprietary format that contains data
3. A collection of files that constitute some meaningful dataset
4. Images capturing data
5. Files related to machine learning, such as trained parameters, or neural network structure definitions

How Google DataSet Search works?

Dataset Search works in multiple languages and there will soon be additional languages as well. You can just enter what you are looking for and it will guide you to the published dataset on the repository’s provider’s site.

Dataset Search is similar to Google Scholar. It lets you find databases wherever they are hosted, whether it’s a publisher’s site, a digital library or a personal webpage. There are certain guidelines for dataset providers in order to describe their data in a way that Google or any other search engine can better understand the content of their pages. The institutions that publish their data online will need to include metadata tags in their web pages to describe theory data including who created it, when it was published, how it was collected, how the data was collected, what are terms for using the data, and so on. This information will then be indexed by Dataset Search and will be combined with the inputs for Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Also Read 9 Amazing Things You Can Do With Google

In simple words, the information is collected, linked, and analyzed with different versions of the same dataset and find publications that may be describing the dataset. The approach is based on an open standard for describing the information (schema.org). Schema.org standard basically means it provides a vocabulary for describing structured data on the internet. It was developed by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. And this is one of the reasons to choose this standard as it is already being used by over 10 million sites. The dataset providers should adopt this common standard so that all datasets are part of this robust ecosystem and more people can locate their datasets within this search feature.

The publishers and data providers can mark up their published data web pages so that search engines can surface the data to searchers within the vertical search feature and make it easy for the people to search.

A search tool like Dataset Search is only as good as the metadata that data publishers are ready to provide.

Google wrote, “As more data repositories use the schema.org standard to describe their datasets, the variety and coverage of datasets that users will find in dataset search will continue to grow.”

If you are looking for any dataset record try searching it now. Click here

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History of Section 377 in India

In 1861, the British introduced & added this Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. It was actually imposed to protect soldiers and colonial administrators from any form of corruption. Due to a fear that these men might turn into homosexuals. As they stay away from their wives, according to “British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality”. A book written by Enze Han and Joseph O’ Mahoney.

Dilution of Section 377

After weeks of discussion by the court and decades of struggle by Indians,  CJI (Chief Justice of India) Dipak Mishra said the law was “irrational”, indefensible and arbitrary”.

A five-judge bench key by CJI Dipak Mishra diluted Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, to exclude all kinds of adult consensual sexual behaviour.

India’s Supreme Court on Thursday (6^th September 2018) struck down one of the world’s oldest bans on consensual gay sex, which was a revolutionary victory for the gay rights.

Section 377 makes consensual sexual acts, both homosexual and heterosexual-a crime if they are against the order of nature.

Section 377 refers to unnatural offences. It says “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished up to 10 years in jail under the 1861 law”.

Will the law Amendment lead to change in society?

As the largest country in the Commonwealth, India’s landmark decision sends a message to other former British colonies. Some of them are still stuck with the laws against homosexuality. The government should understand that homosexuality is not a crime, it’s one’s choice and should be accepted easily and happily by the society.

LGBT Community has now the same rights as of any ordinary citizen of India. The essence of liberty means freedom of choice and LGBT people have got it!

It’s a feeling of contentment that the Supreme Court has restored the dignity denied to the LGBT community by recognising the community’s right to love.

Those who did not overtly hide their sexuality but also did not make any effort to speak about their sexuality can happily say it loud!

The change is very significant, not only to India but to other countries as well. This act may encourage more countries to follow the footsteps of India.

After Dilution of Section 377

As soon as the news was all around India, the people in many cities danced, kissed, and hugged each other with happiness. The member of the LGBT community partied late night and were delighted. The human rights activists showered themselves in a snowstorm of confetti.

Greeting the Supreme Court verdict on decriminalising homosexuality, Samarpan Maiti, the second runner-up of “Mr. Gay World 2018” said that it is like getting “released from a dark jail”. The apex court has ruled that Section 377 of the IPC that criminalised gay sex between the consenting adults is “manifestly arbitrary”.

Dilution of Section 377 was a great relief. The LGBT community has their own identity as if a person is a gay or a lesbian doesn’t matter anymore. Everyone has their right to choose their sexuality. It’s not something that one should be ashamed of just because of the cultural norms. I am happy that there will be no discrimination in the society now. LGBT people who have been living under the fear of prosecution can now live without any fear and stigma.

Society is now better for individualism!

Changing the law was a vital first step in building a new society. LGBT people need protection, respect and support in this society. However, it will take some time for the society to accept the change.

The conservative attitude of the society towards homosexuality still persists in many areas. Many LGBT in India avoid confessing about their sexuality to their families due to the fear of banishment and mockery. It was shocking to hear that many families even performed some kind of rituals to cure homosexuality.

Here, people need to understand that homosexuality is not any kind of disease that has to be cured, it’s one’s choice.

Every citizen of the country should have access to all the rights, the right to marry, the right to adopt, the right to freedom and no one should question them be it regarding their sexuality

I know social changes in India takes a lot of time. We may depend on the law to change certain aspects. But it is actually social and cultural norms which really bring about the change and change will take time. Changing the law is one thing and changing the mind-sets of the people is another. Let’s stay optimistic about it!

I feel, everyone in this society need to take broader and coordinated effort. Anything that helps to increase the visibility of LGBT people to get away with the stereotypes and social and cultural norms in order to show that LGBT people occupy the same position as everyone else does will surely help to make societal change faster.

This is the beginning of a new phase for LGBT people and it’s the time for celebration!

Reference: The Economics Times

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