A Review on COVID-19: Origin, Spread, Symptoms, Treatment, and Prevention

Abstract

A novel type of coronavirus, identified as 2019-nCoV or COVID-19, appeared in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and continued to spread in 2020. On January 24th, 2020, about 830 cases were reported in nine countries, namely: China, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, Nepal, Vietnam, the United States, and Taiwan. Also, about 26 confirmed deaths have been recorded, especially for patients with serious underlying diseases. On March 11th, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic. Until June 3rd, 2020, this outbreak virus caused over 6,500,000 detected infection cases in 210 countries and territories and around 383,000 confirmed death cases. Although information about the appearance of the virus, i.e., its origin and capacity to spread among people, is still unclear, there are growing numbers of cases that are occurring from the communication of infected people with uninfected ones. 2019-nCoV is the third coronavirus which was detected in humans in the past two decades, after SARS-CoV and Middle Eastern Respiratory Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) that appeared in 2002 and 2012, respectively. In this review, we summarized the up-to-date information regarding COVID-19’s origin, ways of spread, patients’ symptoms, treatment, and prevention.