HYDERABAD: Even as the Centre is dispelling notions that the coronavirus lockdown will not extend beyond mid-April, acclaimed cardiologist Dr Rahul Potluri says the lockdown can be lifted if “the number of deaths is not vastly increasing and if the system can cope with the number of new cases coming”, but not a day before that.
In a chat with The New Indian Express Editor G S Vasu, Dr Potluri, who works with the NHS in the UK and at KIMS, Hyderabad, and is a pioneer in using big data in healthcare research, hotly contests the findings of an MIT paper on the effect of heat on Covid-19.
“The MIT paper looking at temperature and the coronavirus is only an abstract, there is no full paper. They only looked at the cases that presented in early mid-March and they correlated this to temperatures. It is a purely computational model with correlation,” he explains.
Also reacting to the study that the virus has different virulent strains in different countries, Dr Potluri says, “this study just looked at genomic patterns of a few of the early cases.” A huge advocate of social distancing, he describes Covid-19 as a problem we have not seen the likes of for over 100 years since, probably, the Spanish Flu.