RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
Immune System and COVID-19
Management and potential therapies SARS-CoV-2 is highly transmissible and infectious coronavirus which is spreading across the globe at an alarming rate. As of 18 May 2021, there are 163,642,990 confirmed cases and 3,390,316 deaths reported from COVID-19. Here, we review the current knowledge regarding the immunopathogenesis and potential therapies for management of COVID-19. Rupesh K Srivastava, Department of Biotechnology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS)
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n December 2019, a pneumonia outbreak occurred in Wuhan city of China that quickly spread across the world and posed serious public health emergency. On 9 January, 2020 novel coronavirus severe respiratory disease syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) was identified as the cause of outbreak in Wuhan. Later on 11 February 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) named the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 as coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19). Coronaviruses infect humans and animals and are associated with various respiratory, gastrointestinal, and neurological disorders. SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus that is recognised to cause infection in humans. The other six coronaviruses are known to cause only mild symptoms. However, there are two notable exceptions: SARS-CoV and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). SARS-CoV is responsible for an epidemic that started from China in the year 2002-2003. This outbreak resulted in 8000 infections and 774 fatalities across 37 countries. MERS-CoV was first detected in 2012 in Saudi Arabia and caused 2,494 confirmed cases and 858 fatalities. SARS-CoV-2 shows 79.6 per cent sequence identity with the SARSCoV. However, bat coronavirus RATGI3 seems to be its closest relative, showing over 96 per cent sequence similarity. SARS-CoV-2 is highly contagious and causing more infections and deaths than both SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. As a result, WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 11 March, 2020.
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