Studies conducted in 2010-15 revealed that coronavirus was found in both animals and humans being.
KARACHI: The coronavirus is not new to the globe. The virus had affected the world even many years back and was recognised in 1960. This virus mainly affects the respiratory system and causes problems similar to those from the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and is, thus called SARS-CoV-2 by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV).
People are confusing COVID-19 with SARS which is quite comprehensible as coronavirus is a large family of viruses that mainly affect lungs, causing common flu or severe disease such as in case of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and SARS. Coronaviruses are named so because of their crown-like spikes on their plane. The most common kinds of coronavirus are: alpha (229E CoV), beta (NL63), gamma (OC43) and delta (HKU1). There are other classes of human coronavirus viz, MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV.
Fever, tiredness, dry cough, sore throat, pain and aches, shortness of breath are the common symptoms of COVID-19 and some people may also report diarrhea, nausea and running nose. People around the world commonly get infected with human coronaviruses 229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1. Sometimes coronaviruses that infect animals can evolve and make people sick, by turning into a new human coronavirus. Three recent examples of this are 2019-nCoV, SARS-CoV, and MERS-CoV. Studies conducted in 2010-15 revealed that coronavirus was found in both animals and humans being.
As for COVID-19, its first case was reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019. Since then, it has spread globally into what is called the 2019-2020 pandemic with 2,656,391 confirmed cases of infection worldwide as of April 22, 2020. Of the total patients, 185,156 have died while 729,815 have recovered.
Since there is still no vaccine to treat the COVID-19 coronavirus — whose mortality rate is 3.4% — there is the dire need for the authorities to raise awareness of the public about the disease and for the public to cooperate with the authorities over their efforts to contain the outbreak.
Amima Iftikhar Ghazali
Published in The Express Tribune, April 24th, 2020.
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