Short Communication
Year: 2020 | Month: July-September | Volume: 5 | Issue: 3 | Pages: 189-192
COVID-19: A Life Changing Pandemic
Yogendra Kumar1, Bindhya Chal Yadav2
1Assistant Professor, Department of Botany, Govt Degree College Nanauta, Saharanpur
2Assistant Professor, Department of Botany, Govt PG College Fatehabad, Agra
Corresponding Author: Yogendra Kumar
ABSTRACT
A newly emerging viral zoonotic disease that was first reported in December 2019 in China and supposed to be spread from Huanan sea food market, Wuhan, China. The causative virus for disease is Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is a member of coronaviridae. The virus crosses the country border and spread very rapidly to other countries and World health organization declared this viral disease as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020. Within a span of three months the virus cause more than 1 lakh clinical cases in 114 countries with a death toll of more than 4 thousand life. Due to its rapid human to human spread and infectious nature, WHO Director General characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic on 11 March. Upto 22 April 2020 the confirmed clinical cases were 24,71,136 with 1,69,006 deaths in more than 200 countries (WHO). The SARS-CoV-2 was isolated from the confirmed infected patients in the first week of January, 2020 by the scientists and characterizes the isolated virus by using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and next-generation sequencing (Zhu et al 2020). Though this virus is similar to SARS corona virus and MERS corona virus, but basic reproduction number (R0) of the COVID-19 virus is higher than the other corona viruses. The basic reproduction number is important for epidemiological study of the infectious diseases to assess the risk of epidemic spread by an infectious agent (Liu et al 2020). The patients affected with the COVID-19 shows non-specific symptoms including the cough, labored breathing and body pain. The present paper is to highlighting the characteristics of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in general and clinical and diagnostics characteristics in particular to help the corona warriors to combat the disease outbreak.
Keywords: COVID-19, Pandemic, Corona, SARS