COVID-19 Beyond the Lungs: How SARS-Cov2 Invades the Human Nervous System

History Of The Pandemic

Since December 2019, the Chinese government had declared an uncontrolled mysterious outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan city. First reports have suspected the emergence from Huanan; a wholesale market for aquatic and live animals sale (Li et al., 2020). Preliminary studies in patients with the respiratory disease revealed the presence of non-identified betacoronavirus sampled from lower respiratory tract. Otherwise, the virus was isolated from the human airway epithelial cells and was then named as 2019–novel Coronavirus (2019–nCoV) (Zhu et al., 2020). Later, electron microscopy observations showed that the virus structure allows it to be classified as a member of the Coronoviridae family. Surprisingly genetic studies showed 88% sequence similarity with 2 derived strains of coronavirus found in bats (RaTG13), while it appears to be more distant from humans SARS (79% similarity) and MERS (50% similarity).(Lu et al., 2020). On February 11, 2020, the Coronavirus Study Group of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses attributed the name of SARS–CoV2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-CoV2) to the newly discovered virus (Gorbalenya et al., 2020). Accordingly, the World Health Organization (WHO) attributed the term COVID-19 to the associated disease (WHO, 2020).