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Corona represents crown-like spikes on the outer surface while Corona viruses are found among the Corona-viridae family in the Nido-virales class. The novel corona virus represents the minute size (65–125 nm in diameter) nucleic materials with single-stranded Ribo-Nuclei Acid (RNA) whose size ranges from 26 to 32kbs in length (typically shown in Figure 1). The existing corona virus families include alpha (
), beta (
), gamma (
) and delta (
) corona virus. Prior to the end of 2019, an outbreak of a novel corona virus of the beta family was reported in Wuhan, an emerging business hub of China. Within the first fifty days of the outbreak, there were over seventy thousand infections and more than one thousand eight hundred were reportedly killed by the virus (Shereen et al., 2020).
Figure 1. Structure of respiratory syndrome causing human corona virus
The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) named the virus as SARS-CoV-2 and the disease as COVID-19 (Cui et al., 2019; Lai et al., 2019; WHOa, 2020). Retrospectively, SRAS-CoV in 2003 infected 8098 individuals with mortality rate of 9%, across twenty-six countries in the world, while COVID-19 has infected about 7.226 million individuals in 213 countries with 409,299 deaths (Worldometers, 2020) as at the time of writing this report. This implies that the transmission rate of SARS-CoV-2 is much higher than SRAS-CoV which could be attributed to genetic recombination event as S protein in the RBD region of SARS-CoV-2 exhibits enhanced transmission ability. According to TheGuardian (2020), SARS-CoV-2 and SRAS-CoV consist of a strip of RNA enclosed in a fatty shell through which protruding protein spikes. The spikes lock the receptors on the surface of the cells lining the human lung and the virus consequently breaks into multiple cells based on its reproductive machinery. Thereafter, the ensuing viruses enter into continuous process of breaking away and killing the cell. The plots of the daily COVID-19 new cases and deaths across the globe for January 2020 to the time of writing this report based on World Health Organization (WHO) report are presented in Figures 2 and 3 respectively (Worldometers, 2020).
Figure 2. COVID-19 daily new cases across the globe
Figure 3. COVID-19 daily new deaths across the globe