The entire world has come to a standstill due to the unprecedented impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Let us look at how various outbreaks of corona viruses have affected us throughout history. M Sai Madhur o say that 2020 has been an eventful year so far would also be a massive understatement. A lot of us were initially shocked at the prospects of a disease that can cause respiratory-tract-infections and be responsible for thousands of deaths worldwide, with mere human-contact to exist in the world. It was baffling that a microorganism would confine all of us in our homes, and halt the world. As we are adjusting to this new routine, we are also consuming a plethora of information and misinformation about this pandemic that is going around online. A video of a 2018 South Korean Drama My Secret Terrius, where a character talks about how a mutant coronavirus would be lethal enough to destroy the world, has become viral, leaving the viewers perplexed about how a K-Drama would predict something as heinous as this, two years ago. The point that should not to be missed is that while COVID-19 is new, coronavirus isn't.
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Environment & people
10
April 2020
The origins of the discovery of coronavirus can be traced back to 1930s when domesticated chickens were infected by an acute respiratory infection caused by Infectious Bronchitis Virus (IBV). Mobile Hepatitis Virus (MHV) and Transmissible Gastroenteritis Virus (TGEV) were discovered in the 1940s, which also affected animals. The foremost cases of coronaviruses affecting humans were discovered in the 1960s when patients of common cold were tested. HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-229E are the viruses responsible for the common cold, with the former infecting cattle and the latter infecting bats along with humans. These were the only two human-coronaviruses known until the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), that was first detected in China, in 2002. SARS, an enveloped, positive-sense, single-stranded RNA virus which infects the epithelial cells within the lungs, was first identified when a farmer was believed to be an intermediary of civets to cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in the Shunde district of Foshan County, in Guangdong in the Yunnan Province of China in November 2002. Initially deemed to be cases of atypical pneumonia, it spread throughout China with the turn of the year. The Republic of China was criticized for notifying WHO, after three months of the outbreak and also notoriously downplaying the number of victims that the illness had claimed. The outbreak of SARS
COV-1 peaked in mid-February and over the next few months, it had spread across 29 countries with 8437 people contracting it, while 813 had succumbed to the epidemic, according to a report by WHO. One of the reports by WHO also suggests that China and Hong Kong were the most affected with 5,327 cases and 349 deaths in the former; and 1,755 cases and 299 deaths in the latter. The symptoms that the patients experienced were headaches, fever, and a type of pneumonia that could cause respiratory failure, the likes of which were ambiguous to the medical fraternity by then, subsequently creating a tremendous amount of disarray and panic. However, with effective measures taken by countries collectively to quarantine and isolate people with the illness, the person-to-person transmission of SARS was declared to be contained by WHO; on July 5, 2003. A year after the declaration by WHO that SARS had ceased to exist, a new species of Coronavirus was identified in the winter of 2004 in the Netherlands, when a sevenmonth-old child showed symptoms suggesting respiratory tract infection (coryza, conjunctivitis, and fever), while his chest X-ray showed typical features of bronchiolitis. The virus was identified as a member of the Coronaviridae family by a group of Dutch scientists and was subsequently named as HCoV-NL63. The virus, found primarily in young children, and immunocompromised
