Epidemiology and Strategies for Coping with Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19): A Narrative Review

On 21 December 2019, the Chinese government reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) a number of cases that looked like a common cold. On 6 January 2020, Chinese authorities reported sixty suspected cases, of which seven were very serious. On 9 January, the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention identified the virus genome sequence of the disease and made it available to the scientists worldwide. On 11 February, the disease was called novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) by WHO, which is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Coronaviruses are a group of viruses that cause damage to various parts of the respiratory tract. Despite all efforts, at the time of this writing, the official number of cases was more than one hundred and two million, and the number of victims exceeded two million and two hundred thousand persons. The case fatality rate of Covid-19 has varied from 0.08% to 10.8% in the world, but fortunately the number of patients who have recovered is very promising and more than 66 million people have recovered. Considering the great importance of this disease and its increasing spread, the purpose of this article is to review the most important scientific evidence regarding the epidemiology of the disease and some strategies to cope with it.