The World Groans Under COVID–19

By Edidiong Albert with agency reports

All is not well across the globe as the deadly infectious disease, Coronavirus, code-named COVID -19 ravages countries at an alarming rate.

The novel disease, which came to the world’s attention on December 31, 2019, through the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) China office, has so far affected 928,319 persons with 639,221 active carriers; 46,512 deaths while 193,647 have reportedly recovered.

Statistics as at Wednesday, April 1, 2020, showed that Africa has recorded 5511 active cases; 6133 total confirmed; 201 total deaths and 421 total recovered.
Europe recorded 353,812 active cases; 450,916 total confirmed; 30,261 total deaths and 66,843 total recovered.
North America has recorded 189,158 active cases; 201,121 total confirmed; 4,110 total deaths and 7,853 total recovered.

For Asia, recorded active cases are 71,416; total confirmed are 178,447; total deaths 7,131 while total recovered are 99,900.

South America has 13,017 active cases; 14,499 total confirmed; 380 total deaths and 1,102 total recovered.

Oceania has 5029 active cases 5469 total confirmed; 21 total deaths and 419 total recovered.

Others are 101 active cases; 714 total confirmed; 10 total deaths and 603 total recovered.

Information pieced together says that the disease has been detected in more than 200 countries and territories, with “Italy, the US and Spain experiencing the most widespread outbreaks outside of China. In the UK, there have been 25,150 confirmed cases and 1,789 deaths as of March 31, 2020.

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For USA, there are reported 177, 401 active cases; 187,729 total confirmed; 3,867 total deaths and 6,461 total recovered.

Also, Canada has recorded 7,269 active cases; 8,612 total confirmed; 101 total deaths and 1242 total recovered.
China has recorded 81,554 total cases; 2,004 active cases; 3,312 total deaths and 76,238 total recovered.

For Nigeria, a total number of 174 victims have been reported, out of which two have died, while nine have totally recovered.

These figures have kept increasing as the world battles to stop its spread across the world.

Observers note that what started as an epidemic mainly limited to China has now become a global pandemic. The Chinese government responded to the initial outbreak by placing Wuhan, a city in Eastern China, with a population of over 11 million and nearby cities under a de-facto quarantine encompassing roughly 50 million people in Hubei province.

However, the quarantine is gradually being lifted as the government watches to see whether there will be fresh eruption of cases. Italy and the US are now the worst hit areas of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hitherto referred to as coronavirus, the WHO on February 11, 2020 announced the official name of the disease as COVID-19. The virus that causes the disease is called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, or Sars-CoV-2 for short.

The COVID-19 is said to have originated from a Wuhan seafood market where wild animals, including marmots, birds, rabbits, bats and snakes are traded illegally.

Reports say that coronavirus is known to jump from animals to humans, so it is thought that the first people infected with the disease – a group primarily made up of stallholders from the seafood market – contracted it from their contact with animals.

According to authorities, quest for the animal source of COVID-19 is still unknown, although there are some strong speculations.

From a team of virologists at the Wuhan Institute for Virology, a detailed report indicated that “the new coronaviruses’ genetic makeup is 96 per cent identical to that of a coronavirus found in bats, while a study published on March 26, 2020 “argues that genetic sequences of coronaviruses in pangolins are between 88.5 and 92.4 per cent similar to the human virus.

Some early cases of COVID-19, however, appear to have inflicted people with no link to the Wuhan market at all, suggesting that the initial route of human infection may pre-date the market cases.