COVID-19 Pandemic in Pakistan

Abstract

Since February 26, 2020, when coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic emerged in Karachi City and rapidly spread throughout Pakistan, the disease has affected more than 6200 people and more than 111 deaths have been reported till April 15. If we compare the disasters of COVID-19 in Pakistan with other countries like China, Iran and European Union nations, so many questions arise. We have so many challenges in controlling this pandemic like the geopolitics of country, poverty, low literacy rate, environmental conditions, hygienic conditions, and food intake habits. In all these aspects, there are poor conditions but the outbreak of COVID-19 in Pakistan was slower than other developing countries. Pakistan’s humid condition, hot weather, early response to COVID-19, population immune system, BCG vaccination and the number of young people favors to attenuate the impact of COVID-19. In this paper, we discuss the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in China, Iran and Pakistan and share day-by-day developments in this pandemic. We present the structure of COVID-19 and its similarity with SARSCOV and SARS-COV2. We also discuss the treatment procedure like use of Remdesivir (an adenosine similarity) used against RNA viruses, Chloroquine (extensively used anti-malarial drug), convalescent plasma, neutralizing antibody targeting the ACE-2 receptor and ACE-2-like molecule that might bind to the S protein of the coronavirus and disadvantages of the discussed medications. The impact of COVID-19 in the economics of Pakistan and government reliefs are also discussed. Key words: • Coronavirus • COVID-19 • Pakistan • Pandemic • Outbreak   Copyright © 2020 Ilyas et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.