Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in December, the general trend has been towards quarantining people exhibiting mild symptoms of the virus at home while critical patients were treated at hospitals.

However, China and the World Health Organisation have said recently that home-isolation of people having mild symptoms might not be an effective measure to contain the spread of the virus, and these people need to be mass quarantined away from their families.

Read: What happens to the body when infected with Covid-19

The World Health Organisation's updated treatment guidelines for medical professionals, released last month, characterise the symptoms of the new coronavirus as either mild or severe.

The National Press Radio quoted Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead of the WHO Health Emergencies Program as saying: "[A] mild infection starts normally with a fever, although it may take a couple of days to get a fever. You will have some respiratory symptoms; you have some aches and pains. You'll have a dry cough. This is what the majority of individuals will have."

According to a report by the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019, in 80pc of coronavirus cases, the symptoms are mild or moderate.

Therefore, many countries including Italy, Spain, India and Pakistan imposed lockdowns, ordering citizens to remain at home and only go to the hospital if the severity of their symptoms increased.

'Mild illness': What the WHO recommends

WHO head of health emergencies Mike Ryan has warned that most of the transmissions happening now were inside homes because of lockdowns in many countries, according to a report by Bloomberg,

"Now we need to go and look in families and find those people that may be sick and remove them and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner," he said, cautioning that people who had the virus have a greater chance of infecting people around them if they are isolated at home.

What the CDC says

An official at the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States told a medical conference that "mildly ill patients should be encouraged to stay home,” according to an Associated Press report.

Dr Sue Gerber said that people having difficulty breathing should seek care, and older people or those with other conditions should contact their doctors early in the course of illness.

Don’t go straight to your doctor’s office — that just risks making more people sick. Call ahead, and ask if you need to be seen and where, the report stated health officials as saying.

Dr Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said that mild symptoms of coronavirus are "nothing that will make you feel like you need to run to a hospital".

What do Pakistani doctors say?

Both the federal and provincial governments have said that people exhibiting mild symptoms of coronavirus will be isolated at home, whereas the Sindh government announced that only people who do not have the facility of self-isolating will be accommodated at government-run centres.

Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Health Dr Zafar Mirza last month also said the government planned to isolate mild to moderate patients in their homes while critical patients would be admitted to the hospital.

"Mild to moderate patients should be in houses — either their own or houses and buildings selected by the government for this purpose — which will be converted into isolation wards," he explained.

“Call the emergency numbers if you have breathlessness or shortness of breath,” Jinnah Post Graduate Medical Center's (JPMC) Dr Seemi Jamali advised. The authorities will ensure you are quarantined and tested if necessary.

'80pc of cluster infections originate at home'

However, a group of Chinese experts that visited Italy last month echoed the WHO's advice against self-isolating people having mild symptoms at home, saying that these people could infect other family members.

Liang Zong’An, head of the respiratory department at the West China Hospital at Sichuan University said that China had made the mistake of isolating people at home early during the virus outbreak, adding to a chorus of voices opposing home isolation.

A researcher from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said that research found 80pc of cluster infections had originated from people who were isolated at home, and advised mass quarantining.

Read: Don't rush to the hospital if you think you have coronavirus — here's why

Dale Fisher, a professor of medicine at the National University of Singapore who was part of the WHO team which visited China early in the outbreak concluded that "mild people are spreading it just as much as severe cases, in fact probably more so".

For countries wanting to contain the spread of Covid-19, “out-of-home quarantine needs to be really pushed,” The Globe and Mail quoted Craig Dalton, a public-health expert at the University of Newcastle as saying.