Coronaviruses are a type of virus that can trigger respiratory infections, from bad colds to – on rare occasions – lethal pneumonia.
Coronaviruses are enveloped viruses with a positive-sense RNA genome. The genome size of coronaviruses are about 26 to 32 kilobases, extraordinarily large for an RNA virus.
Seven strains are known to circulate among humans. These include SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) which killed 4 people in the early 2000s, and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), which has claimed 850 lives since 2012.
The name "coronavirus" is derived from the Latin corona, meaning crown or halo, and refers to how virions look under an electron microscope.
An outbreak of a novel coronavirus was identified during mid-December 2019 in the city of Wuhan in Central China. It was a group of people with pneumonia with no clear cause. It was soon seen as a new strain of coronavirus, which was named 2019-nCoV.
On January 20, 2020, Chinese premier Li Keqiang called for efforts to stop and control the 2019-nCoV epidemic. Ten days later, The World Health Organization declared that coronavirus outbreak is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
The 2019–20 coronavirus outbreak was linked to snakes sold at a slaughtered-animal market in Wuhan, where vendors legally sold live snakes from stalls in close quarters with hundreds of others, creating what experts described as a perfect incubator for novel pathogens.
Some investigators believe the coronavirus outbreak may have come from humans eating bats. Scientists have long struggled to understand how the mammals carry so many viruses without getting sick.
The virus can incubate in the body for up to 14 days before symptoms appear. They start off as flu-like and may be mild – a temperature, sore throat, dry cough etc. Ninety percent of people get a fever, 80 percent get a dry cough and 30 percent suffer from shortness of breath. Some patients have developed pneumonia, which involves inflammation of the small air sacs in the lungs.
While Ebola kills half the people who get it and SARS killed 9.6%, the new corona virus’ mortality rate appears to be only about 2.2%, based on Chinese national data from January 20, 2020 onwards.
The first confirmed death from 2019-nCoV occurred in China on January 9, 2020.
The first local transmission of 2019-nCoV outside China occurred in Vietnam from a father to his son whereas the first local transmission not involving family occurred in Germany, on January 22, 2020 when a German man contracted the disease from a Chinese business visitor at a meeting near Munich.
The first death outside China was reported in the Philippines, where a 44-year-old man confirmed to have contracted 2019-nCoV died on February 1, 2020.
The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak to be a pandemic on March 11, 2020. At that date, over 125,000 cases of the disease had been confirmed in more than 120 countries and territories, with major outbreaks in mainland China (80,000 cases). More than 4,500 had died (3,200 in China).
The Italian government implemented a national quarantine on March 9, 2020. By that date there had been 7,375 confirmed cases, and 366 deaths in Italy.
On Friday, March 13, 2020, the U.S. declared a national emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was possibly the worst Friday the 13th of all time.
Coronaviruses are enveloped viruses with a positive-sense RNA genome. The genome size of coronaviruses are about 26 to 32 kilobases, extraordinarily large for an RNA virus.
Seven strains are known to circulate among humans. These include SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) which killed 4 people in the early 2000s, and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), which has claimed 850 lives since 2012.
The name "coronavirus" is derived from the Latin corona, meaning crown or halo, and refers to how virions look under an electron microscope.
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| Coronaviruses viewed under an electron microscope |
An outbreak of a novel coronavirus was identified during mid-December 2019 in the city of Wuhan in Central China. It was a group of people with pneumonia with no clear cause. It was soon seen as a new strain of coronavirus, which was named 2019-nCoV.
On January 20, 2020, Chinese premier Li Keqiang called for efforts to stop and control the 2019-nCoV epidemic. Ten days later, The World Health Organization declared that coronavirus outbreak is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
The 2019–20 coronavirus outbreak was linked to snakes sold at a slaughtered-animal market in Wuhan, where vendors legally sold live snakes from stalls in close quarters with hundreds of others, creating what experts described as a perfect incubator for novel pathogens.
Some investigators believe the coronavirus outbreak may have come from humans eating bats. Scientists have long struggled to understand how the mammals carry so many viruses without getting sick.
The virus can incubate in the body for up to 14 days before symptoms appear. They start off as flu-like and may be mild – a temperature, sore throat, dry cough etc. Ninety percent of people get a fever, 80 percent get a dry cough and 30 percent suffer from shortness of breath. Some patients have developed pneumonia, which involves inflammation of the small air sacs in the lungs.
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| Symptoms of 2019-nCoV (Wuhan coronavirus). |
While Ebola kills half the people who get it and SARS killed 9.6%, the new corona virus’ mortality rate appears to be only about 2.2%, based on Chinese national data from January 20, 2020 onwards.
The first confirmed death from 2019-nCoV occurred in China on January 9, 2020.
The first local transmission of 2019-nCoV outside China occurred in Vietnam from a father to his son whereas the first local transmission not involving family occurred in Germany, on January 22, 2020 when a German man contracted the disease from a Chinese business visitor at a meeting near Munich.
The first death outside China was reported in the Philippines, where a 44-year-old man confirmed to have contracted 2019-nCoV died on February 1, 2020.
The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak to be a pandemic on March 11, 2020. At that date, over 125,000 cases of the disease had been confirmed in more than 120 countries and territories, with major outbreaks in mainland China (80,000 cases). More than 4,500 had died (3,200 in China).
The Italian government implemented a national quarantine on March 9, 2020. By that date there had been 7,375 confirmed cases, and 366 deaths in Italy.
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| Civil Protection volunteers carrying out health checks at Bologna Airport Source Wikipedia |
On Friday, March 13, 2020, the U.S. declared a national emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was possibly the worst Friday the 13th of all time.
Every person with 2019-nCoV passes it onto an average 2.6 people.
The virus hat causes Covid-19 can survive for up to 24 hours on cardboard and two to three daus on plastic and stainless steel.
Efforts to prevent the spread of coronavirus have included travel restrictions, curfews, quarantines, event postponements and cancellations, and facility closures. These include nationwide quarantines of Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Germany, closing of schools and universities affecting more than 950 million students worldwide, the postponement or cancellation of sporting and cultural events and the suspension of in-person religious services,
"Happy Birthday" gained a second identity in 2020 as the accompaniment to a hand-washing ritual in the Coronavirus pandemic. Center for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that to wash your hands effectively, you must scrub often with soap and water for 20 seconds It takes about 10 seconds to sing 'Happy Birthday." So if someone sings it twice, that gives them the 20 seconds necessary to wash their hands properly and rid them of COVID-19.
The Chinese province of Hubei, where the pandemic began, lifted travel restrictions on most of its 60 million residents on March 25, 2020, ending a nearly two-month lockdown.
Scientists at Oxford University revealed on June 16, 2020 they had identified the first drug shown to reduce coronavirus-related deaths: an already existing steroid called dexamethasone. It reduced the death rate of patients on ventilators by a third and patients on oxygen by a fifth.
The virus hat causes Covid-19 can survive for up to 24 hours on cardboard and two to three daus on plastic and stainless steel.
Efforts to prevent the spread of coronavirus have included travel restrictions, curfews, quarantines, event postponements and cancellations, and facility closures. These include nationwide quarantines of Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Germany, closing of schools and universities affecting more than 950 million students worldwide, the postponement or cancellation of sporting and cultural events and the suspension of in-person religious services,
"Happy Birthday" gained a second identity in 2020 as the accompaniment to a hand-washing ritual in the Coronavirus pandemic. Center for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that to wash your hands effectively, you must scrub often with soap and water for 20 seconds It takes about 10 seconds to sing 'Happy Birthday." So if someone sings it twice, that gives them the 20 seconds necessary to wash their hands properly and rid them of COVID-19.
The Chinese province of Hubei, where the pandemic began, lifted travel restrictions on most of its 60 million residents on March 25, 2020, ending a nearly two-month lockdown.
Scientists at Oxford University revealed on June 16, 2020 they had identified the first drug shown to reduce coronavirus-related deaths: an already existing steroid called dexamethasone. It reduced the death rate of patients on ventilators by a third and patients on oxygen by a fifth.
A coronavirus outbreak at the White House in late September and early October 2020 involved at least 35 people, including President Trump, the First Lady, three senators, and a governor. Many of the infections appeared to be related to a ceremony held on September 26, 2020 in the White House Rose Garden for the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, where seating was not socially distanced and participants were mostly unmasked.
After the coronavirus was detected in December 2019, the genetic sequence of COVID‑19 was published on January 11, 2020, triggering an urgent international response to prepare for an outbreak and hasten development of a preventive vaccine. Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, is a COVID-19 vaccine developed by BioNTech and manufactured and distributed by Pfizer and Fosun Pharmaceutical. It is the first COVID-19 vaccine to be authorized by a stringent regulatory authority
The United Kingdom's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency gave the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine a temporary regulatory approval on December 2, 2020. It was the first COVID-19 vaccine to be approved for national use after undergoing large scale trials.
On December 8, 2020, Margaret "Maggie" Keenan, 90, from Coventry, England became the first patent in the world to receive a COVID‑19 vaccine. The first shots were given in the American mass vaccination campaign on December 14, 2020.
A computer program named "World One" that was developed in 1973 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), predicted 2020 to be the year when a series of catastrophic events kick off a 20-year process of a slow demise of human civilization.
According to data from the Wikimedia Foundation, in 2020, COVID-19-related articles across all Wikipedias received more than 579 million pageviews.
"Lockdown" was named the Collins Word of the Year 2020. Several other words related to the Covid-19 pandemic were included in Collins Dictionary's longer list of ten words of the year such as “coronavirus,” and “self-isolate.”
By February 2021, more Americans had died from coronavirus than on the battlefields of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined.
The Delta variant, a variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19., was first detected in India in late 2020. It became the dominant variant worldwide and had spread to over 179 countries by November 2021.
India registered 314,835 new COVID-19 cases on April 22, 2021, which was the highest one-day increase in cases worldwide since the beginning of the pandemic. Over 2,000 deaths were recorded in the 24-hour period as the country struggled with a lack of oxygen and a "double mutant" variant, named B.1.617.
By May 1, 2021, adults in the U.S. across all 50 states were eligible to receive a Pfizer, Moderna, or Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine.
The Omicron variant was first detected in South Africa on November 24, 2021. The new variant is more infectious than other variants but less virulent than previous strains, especially compared to the Delta variant.
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on May 5, 2023 that it was ending its designation of the COVID-19 pandemic as a global health emergency. The decision came after a meeting of the WHO's emergency committee, which found that the pandemic was no longer a "public health emergency of international concern" (PHEIC).
Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discoveries that led to the development of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. Their work has had a profound impact on the world, and their contributions have saved millions of lives.
Karikó and Weissman began their research on mRNA vaccines in the early 2000s. They were interested in using mRNA to deliver instructions to the body's cells to produce proteins that could fight disease. However, there were several challenges that needed to be overcome before mRNA vaccines could be safely and effectively used in humans.
One of the main challenges was that mRNA is very fragile and can easily be degraded by the body. Karikó and Weissman developed a modified form of mRNA that is more stable and less likely to be degraded. They also developed a method for delivering the mRNA to the body's cells. Karikó and Weissman's research paved the way for the development of the first mRNA vaccines.
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