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Review
. 2021 Mar 30:11:596201.
doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2021.596201. eCollection 2021.

Wuhan to World: The COVID-19 Pandemic

Ashok Kumar  1   2 , Rita Singh  1   3 , Jaskaran Kaur  1   3 , Sweta Pandey  1   3 , Vinita Sharma  1   4 , Lovnish Thakur  1   3 , Sangeeta Sati  1 , Shailendra Mani  1 , Shailendra Asthana  1 , Tarun Kumar Sharma  1 , Susmita Chaudhuri  1 , Sankar Bhattacharyya  1 , Niraj Kumar  1
Affiliations
Review

Wuhan to World: The COVID-19 Pandemic

Ashok Kumar et al. Front Cell Infect Microbiol. .

Abstract

COVID-19 is a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), caused by SARS-CoV-2, a novel virus which belongs to the family Coronaviridae. It was first reported in December 2019 in the Wuhan city of China and soon after, the virus and hence the disease got spread to the entire world. As of February 26, 2021, SARS-CoV-2 has infected ~112.20 million people and caused ~2.49 million deaths across the globe. Although the case fatality rate among SARS-CoV-2 patient is lower (~2.15%) than its earlier relatives, SARS-CoV (~9.5%) and MERS-CoV (~34.4%), the SARS-CoV-2 has been observed to be more infectious and caused higher morbidity and mortality worldwide. As of now, only the knowledge regarding potential transmission routes and the rapidly developed diagnostics has been guiding the world for managing the disease indicating an immediate need for a detailed understanding of the pathogen and the disease-biology. Over a very short period of time, researchers have generated a lot of information in unprecedented ways in the key areas, including viral entry into the host, dominant mutation, potential transmission routes, diagnostic targets and their detection assays, potential therapeutic targets and drug molecules for inhibiting viral entry and/or its replication in the host including cross-neutralizing antibodies and vaccine candidates that could help us to combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In the current review, we have summarized the available knowledge about the pathogen and the disease, COVID-19. We believe that this readily available knowledge base would serve as a valuable resource to the scientific and clinical community and may help in faster development of the solution to combat the disease.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; coronaviruses; diagnostics; therapeutics; transmission.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Overview of COVID-19 progression and key four-arms for its management.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The major chronological events in the emergences of SARS-CoV-2.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The molecular mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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