Introduction The start of the new decade has been dominated by fear and worry over an epidemic of an influenzalike disease caused by a novel virus; named SARS-CoV-2. The epidemic originated in Wuhan, Hubei province within mainland China in December of 2019. By the date of writing of this paper, the virus had spread to 67 countries across all continents except Antarctica, infected a total of 87,470 people. 2,990 people died as a result of contracting this disease, called COVID-19, while 42,670 had recovered, leaving 44,800 still known to be infected (Dong et al, 2020). The global media coverage of this outbreak has been extensive, increasing especially when the World Health Organisation (WHO) raised concern about the epidemic and the disease was exported outside of mainland China. The general public has so far been overwhelmed with a flood of information, most of which is quite often contradictory. Typically the two extremes of the type of information provided via the media are either that the disease is very deadly and dangerous, evoking fear and panic, encouraging stocking of food and public anxiety; or that the disease is no worse than the common flu and should not be of great national or global concern. This lack of concordant public information could have dire consequences in the event of an outbreak within the country as the public which chose to believe one extreme will not conform with the directives of the local authorities which may be in line with the other extreme of information type. The aim of this paper, thus, is to analyse the scientific literature published so far on the outbreak and disease and therefore help the general public formulate a general understanding of the outbreak based on scientific knowledge.
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