03 April 2020 | News | By Ankit Kankar
The COVID-19 pandemic
The virus causing the current outbreak is called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, shortened to SARS-CoV-2. The disease is called coronavirus disease, shortened to COVID-19.
These names have been assigned by the World Health Organization and the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses.22
The WHO also refers to the virus as “the virus responsible for COVID-19” or “the COVID-19 virus” when communicating with the public. We follow the same conventions here.
The outbreak was first noticed in the city of Wuhan, China. Wuhan is the capital of the Hubei Province and has about 11 million inhabitants. On 29 December 2019, Chinese authorities identified a cluster of similar cases of pneumonia in the city.
These cases were soon determined to be caused by a novel coronavirus that was later named SARS-CoV-2.23
The first cases of COVID-19 outside of China were identified on January 13 in Thailand and on January 16 in Japan.
On January 23rd the city of Wuhan and other cities in the region were placed on lockdown by the Chinese Government.
Since then COVID-19 has spread to many more countries – cases have been reported in all world regions. By March it developed into a global pandemic and was declared as such by the WHO.