More people getting the virus means that more people can transmit the virus further. A group of people exposed to the virus through one person can carry it to their homes, offices and even their neighbourhoods.

The other thing that happens is that when more people get sick, more people require hospital care. This includes isolation wards for those affected by the virus, and in cases with the elderly and individuals with conditions like cancer and diabetes, ventilators are required.

Pakistan, like any other country, has a small and limited amount of testing kits, isolation wards, hospital beds, ventilators and equipment to deal with COVID-19 cases. If the spread of coronavirus gets too fast because people were not precautious enough, we might not have the resources to take care of all the sick people at once. This has happened in countries like Italy and the UK, where the hospitals do not have enough capacity to take care of the sick and hundreds of people are dying every day.

To prevent this from happening, precautions must be taken to make sure the spread of the virus is slow enough for the hospital to keep taking care of patients and discharging them. This happens from methods like social distancing, improving hygiene and protective equipment which governments from all over the world are enforcing. These are explained in the next sections.

Precautions taken by everyone on an individual level can ensure that when someone gets sick, doctors are available with isolation wards, testing kits and ventilators to take care of that person. The elderly and vulnerable are going to require hospital care so we must do our best to ensure that we have enough capacity left in our hospitals.