Coronavirus: origins, signs, prevention and management of patients

The new coronavirus—officially known as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)—is a recently discovered coronavirus that causes the illness COVID-19 (World Health Organization (WHO), 2020a). Coronavirus is one of the major pathogens that primarily target the human respiratory system. Previous outbreaks of coronaviruses (CoVs) include the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV, which have been previously characterised as agents that are a great public health threat.

In late December 2019, a cluster of patients were admitted to hospitals in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, with an initial diagnosis of pneumonia of an unknown aetiology. These patients were epidemiologically linked to a seafood and wet animal wholesale market in Wuhan (Bogoch et al, 2020; Lu et al, 2020). Early reports predicted the onset of a potential coronavirus outbreak (Rothan and Byrareddy, 2020).