Covid-19

The official name of the disease pillaging the world by WHO is Covid-19 shortened from Corona virus disease 2019. The causative agent is Covid-19 virus, this is to avoid confusion with SARS of 2002/2003.

The formal name of the virus by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses is SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2). This name is because the virus is related to the SARS virus which caused the outbreak in Southern China in 2002 which affected 26 countries with 774 deaths.

It's also called the novel Corona virus.

Covid-19's  name as a pandemic is a new term without a universal agreed definition, (😏, it has pretty much defined itself) "pandemic" is coined because many countries have been affected by the disease.

Covid-19 is a respiratory illness and spread mainly through air droplets coming from the infected individuals. It started as a "mysterious illness" in Wuhan, China in late 2019.
Covid-19 being a zoonotic (from animal to human) disease, the specific animal origin and index patient of the disease is still unknown. This we do know; the seafood market in Wuhan had wild animals been traded illegally, from bats to snakes, the list goes on. The stallholders in this market were likely the first to be infected but then there are cases that seem to exist before those from the market.

Most common symptoms of Covid-19 include;

• Fever
• Dry cough
• Fatigue
• Sore throat/running nose.

Breathing difficulties and organ failure later result in severe cases. It can also be asymptomatic (no visible symptom) but it's still infectious.

Studies have not been concluded to solidify the groups most susceptible to the virus. Though the death risk rises with age and underlying sickness, still, young healthy adults are still at risk of contracting and it becoming life threatening.

No clinical studies have proven this but individuals with certain conditions like hypertension leading to increased ACE2 (a protein) levels and taking ACE inhibitor drugs have a higher death risk. ACE works with ACE2, but when ACE2 is free it can aid the virus' purpose.

It's still yet unknown if recovering from the virus makes the individual immune in the long term. The vaccine or drug is still far from being made. The cases globally are more than 5million, deaths are more than 300, 000...

Seeing, hearing, watching the colossal damage to families, economies, jobs...that Covid-19 has caused is saddening. It brings me to ask myself, "how will the world ever recover from this?"