Millennium pandemic: A review of coronavirus disease (COVID-19)

Coronaviruses, a large family of single-stranded RNA viruses, can infect humans and animals, and can cause neurological, gastrointestinal and hepatic diseases as well as causing various lung diseases, including pneumonia, with shortness of breath, cough and fever. At the end of December 2019, a group of health authorities reported unidentified cases of pneumonia in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organization (WHO) used term 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) to refer to a coronavirus that affected the lower respiratory tract of patients with pneumonia in Wuhan, China on 29 December and the WHO announced that the official name of the 2019 novel coronavirus was coronavirus disease (COVID-19). COVID-19 is seen in many countries around the World and has been accepted as a pandemic by WHO. It is defined as a suspicious case with fever, sore throat, cough, and people with a history of traveling to China or some parts of the country, or someone who contact with a patient who has a history of travel in China or contact with a confirmed COVID-19 infection patient. Currently, there is no proven vaccine or antiviral therapy that can be used against animal or human coronavirus. To control the outbreak, the drugs must be developed as soon as possible. Various drugs have been used in the treatment of COVID-19 and the main ones are chloroquine, remdesivir, lopinavir/ritonavir, oseltamivir, favipiravir. Since the virus affects the whole World, vaccines and/or new curative antiviral drugs are needed to end the pandemic. For this purpose, large-scale observational studies are needed.