Cases
of COVID-19 first emerged in late 2019, when a mysterious illness was reported in Wuhan, China. The cause of the disease was soon confirmed as
a new kind of coronavirus and the infection has since spread to many
countries around the world and become pandemic.
What started as an epidemic mainly limited to China has now become a truly global pandemic. There have now been over 884, 997 confirmed cases and 44, 200 deaths (as of April 1, 2020),
according to John Hopkins University, which collates information
from national and international health authorities. The disease has been
detected in more than 202 countries
and territories, with the US, Italy, Spain, France, UK, Germany and
Iran experiencing the most widespread outbreaks outside of China
On February 11, 2020, the World Health Organization announced that
the official name would be COVID-19, a shortened version of 'coronavirus
disease 2019'. The WHO refers to the specific virus that causes this
disease as the COVID-19 virus. This is not the formal name for the virus
– the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses calls it the
“severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2”, or SARS-CoV-2 because
it is related to the virus that caused the SARS outbreak in 2003.
However, to avoid confusion with SARS the WHO calls it the COVID-19 virus when communicating with the public.
Early
in the outbreak, the virus was called 2019-nCoV by the WHO. The virus is also often referred to as the novel coronavirus, 2019 coronavirus or just the coronavirus.
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