Facts and Figures on Covid-19 Pandemic Outbreak

ABSTRACT A variety of infectious public health problems are prevailing in the world. Among these, epidemics of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), H1N1 influenza and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome corona virus (MERS-Co V) emerged as very important issues during last three decades as these infections caused quite large number of human deaths worldwide. Coronaviruses are single-stranded positive sense RNA viruses which mainly in past were considered responsible for high percentage of (around 30%) of common cold/flu cases. Viruses causing SARS, MERS and COVID-19 are members of family Coronavirdae. World Health Organization (WHO) reported that the novel Cov-19 virus infection was first diagnosed in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China during December 2019. Initially the virus was named as nCoV-19 and later disease due to this virus was named as COVID-19, and recently named as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. This new coronavirus was found to have 86.9% homology to a bat corona virus and hence it was suspected to have been originated from bats. Till 15th January 2021, the COVID-19 infection has been reported from 219 countries. It has caused over 20 million deaths in humans around the globe. Countries reporting very high death/infection rates include USA (393,948/23,617,815), Brazil (206,009/5,257,459), Mexico (136,917/1,571,901), India (153,000/10,596,442), UK (84,767/3,211,576), France (69,031/2,830,842), Russia (63,940/3,495,816) and Italy (80,326/2,319,036). Worldwide a total of over 96,750,700 COVID-19 cases have so far been reported. As reported earlier this pandemic has hit almost every country worldwide causing exceptionally high morbidity and mortality. Amongst the South Asian countries India is worst hit by this deadly COVID-19. Pakistan's neighboring Iran is also very badly infected and reported 57,057 deaths of 1,348,316 infected people. In Pakistan 52,411,930 confirm cases of COVID-19 and around 11,000 deaths are reported in various region of the country.