Abstract

Coronavirus belongs to the family Coronaviridae and subfamily Orthocoronavirinae including α-, β-, γ-, and Δ-coronavirus. Looking at the history, it was believed that coronavirus primarily affected birds and mammals. However, recent reports showed that the virus has crossed the interspecies barrier and can infect humans as well. The lethal nature of coronavirus can be realized from the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2002 and 2012, respectively. Both SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV belong to the β-coronavirus family. In 2019, a novel coronavirus (nCOV) related to SARS and MERS has been identified in China, capable of human-to-human transmission. nCOV was later renamed as severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. The SARS-CoV-2, emerged as an endemic when China informed World Health Organization (WHO) about the cases of pneumonia of an unknown etiology in Wuhan city in Hubei Province. Consequently, the disease spread to other parts of China and to the rest of the world, causing terror and fear across the globe. WHO declared it a pandemic on March 11, 2020.

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