Environmental toxicities might encourage susceptibility to COVID-19 pandemic: A brief commentary
Authors: Joystu Dutta, Tirthankar Sen, Sufia Zaman, Abhijit Mitra
DOI: 10.87349/ahuri/180910
Page No: 84-95
Abstract
COVID 19 or Novel Coronavirus is a near unstoppable killer and is an emerging and rapidly evolving medical emergency situation across the globe. This gigantic viral outbreak was declared to be a Public Health Emergency of an international concern on January 30, 2020. World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19 (2019- nCOV) to be a global pandemic on March 11, 2020 and until April 8, 2020, 5:30 GMT 5:30, it has reported 1, 317, 130 confirmed cases of SARS-COV 2 infections worldwide with 74, 304 confirmed deaths and 212 countries, areas and territories affected by the viral outbreak of unprecedented nature. This apocalyptic global public health emergency scenario started with a reporting of pneumonia with an unknown cause in WHO country office located in Wuhan, Hubei province in People’s Republic of China (PRC) on December 31, 2019.The clinical characteristics of the infection are very similar to viral pneumonia. Respiratory sample analysis by PRC Centers for Disease Control (CDC) confirmed that the infection is related to Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia (NCP) and was caused by Coronavirus (Huang, et al., 2019). WHO officially named this viral outbreak as COVID-19 and International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) ascribed it as SARS-COV-2, the abbreviation for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2, a member of large β – coronavirus family widely prevalent in nature. The extremely high transmissibility and infectivity despite of comparatively low mortality rates makes SARS-COV-2 a unique member of the family with SARS and MERS (Liu, et al., 2020). The crude mortality ratio (the number of reported deaths divided by the number of reported cases) is between 3-4% while the infection mortality rates (the number of reported deaths by the number of infections) is comparatively lower (COVID-19 Situation Report- 46, WHO).
