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Fox News medical correspondent Dr. Mehmet Oz said on Thursday that Americans must remain calm during the coronavirus outbreak because panicking will only “pull you away from the calmness you need to succeed.”
“Oftentimes, they think they have coronavirus because they’re so anxious about it,” Dr. Oz told “Fox & Friends.”
“Every small little symptom, you know, they don’t quite smell as well as they did this morning as they did yesterday. They think they have it — they have a little cough, a little belly ache. I don’t want to downplay these issues; they may actually have coronavirus because people have very mild symptoms often.”
But Oz said that the panic attacks can be “devastating” to a person’s health.
“It is a physical problem. It’s not just in your head, your whole body — the rapid palpitations, the sweating, the feeling the world is closing in around you. These symptoms can cause all kinds of detrimental effects.”
SCIENTISTS OFFER HOPEFUL NEWS ON COVID-19 VACCINE BASED ON VIRUS’ MUTATION RATE
Meanwhile, researchers in Italy suggested in a study that the COVID-19 disease is slow to mutate, based on its genetic material.
This finding could aid in helping large swaths of people over an extended period of time once a specific cure is found.
The study, which was produced by two independent teams in the country, used “a new next-generation sequencing (NGS) research assay” from Thermo Fisher Scientific on Italian COVID-19 patients. The experts then compared them to a sample from the original outbreak to come up with their findings.
White House coronavirus task force member Anthony S. Fauci has said: “it will take at least a year to a year in a half to have a vaccine we can use.”
Oz said that the medical community is concerned that the panic at coronavirus is going to be worse than the virus itself.
“If we can sort of balance that out — for the first few months, we were saying guys wake up this is a problem — now the medical community is saying ‘let’s step back for a second. You’re going to be fine.’ If you look at the survival numbers, if you’re under the age of 20, we don’t have a death yet. There are very few above that until you get in the ’50s.”
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“It’s a pretty safe virus for the majority of Americans,” Oz added.
