From SARS-CoV to Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) - A Brief Review

Abstract

Emerging and reemerging pathogens are global challenges for public health. For the third time in as many decades, a zoonotic coronavirus has crossed species to infect human populations. Given the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) outbreak in 2002 and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) outbreak in 2012, 2019-nCoV is the third coronavirus to emerge in the human population in the past 18 years-an outbreak that has raised great hue and cry globally as it has sickened thousands of people across the world. This novel coronavirus was named as COVID-19 which stands for Corona Virus Disease 2019. The 2019-nCoV originated from Wuhan, Hubei Province, China beginning in December 2019. The World Health Organization declared it as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. At that point, there were 9826 confirmed cases globally, with 213 deaths. Of these, 9720 cases were in China; outside of China, health authorities reported 106 confirmed cases in 19 countries. As of February 2, the WHO updated the count, reporting 14 557 confirmed cases from 24 countries-14 411 of them in China. In this review we focus our attention on Covid-19 and how different this epidemic is from the previous two outbreak caused by coronavirus.