The central government has asked states and union territories to encourage their citizens to use homemade cloth masks instead of valved N-95 masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
According to Shi Zhengli, an expert on SARS-like coronaviruses, the coronavirus bears stark resemblance with the frozen samples of bat virus that were sent to Wuhan Institute of Virology, collected from an abandoned bat cave in China's Yunnan province