Renowned Islamic scholar, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi has come out to advise the people of Kaduna State to not allow the Eid-el-Fitr celebration to affect the positive strides the state has made amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Sheikh Ahmad revealed this while speaking to newsmen shortly after Gov. Nasir El-Rufai met with some Islamic scholars at the Government House.

According to him, unlike other nations where crowds in worship places could be controlled for special celebrations, it is not possible in Nigeria.

He added that if the state allows Muslims to come out and pray, the people will troop out in thousands and that will worsen the outbreak in these trying times.

His words, “Once you allow people to come and pray, they are going to troop out in thousands you cannot control.

“The point is that we have stayed for over two months under lockdown; we are afraid that one single day will come and spoil all the gains that we had.

“Kaduna is one of the states that have the least infection rates.

“We can see the rate of the calamity in other northern states like Sokoto, Katsina, Kano, Yobe, Borno, but Alhamdulillah, because Kaduna had gone into lockdown earlier than these states, we have less infection rates. Nobody can deny this fact.”

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Coronaviruses are a group of related viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds. In humans, coronaviruses cause respiratory tract infections that can be mild, such as some cases of the common cold (among other possible causes, predominantly rhinoviruses), and others that can be lethal, such as SARS, MERS, and COVID-19. Symptoms in other species vary: in chickens, they cause an upper respiratory tract disease, while in cows and pigs they cause diarrhea. There are yet to be vaccines or antiviral drugs to prevent or treat human coronavirus infections.

Coronaviruses constitute the subfamily Orthocoronavirinae, in the family Coronaviridae, order Nidovirales, and realm Riboviria. They are enveloped viruses with a positive-sense single-stranded RNA genome and a nucleocapsid of helical symmetry. The genome size of coronaviruses ranges from approximately 27 to 34 kilobases, the largest among known RNA viruses. The name coronavirus is derived from the Latin corona, meaning “crown” or “halo”, which refers to the characteristic appearance reminiscent of a crown or a solar corona around the virions (virus particles) when viewed under two-dimensional transmission electron microscopy, due to the surface covering in club-shaped protein spikes.

Human coronaviruses were first discovered in the late 1960s. The earliest ones discovered were an infectious bronchitis virus in chickens and two in human patients with the common cold (later named human coronavirus 229E and human coronavirus OC43). Other members of this family have since been identified, including SARS-CoV in 2003, HCoV NL63 in 2004, HKU1 in 2005, MERS-CoV in 2012, and SARS-CoV-2 (formerly known as 2019-nCoV) in 2019. Most of these have involved serious respiratory tract infections.