Review of recent progress and future perspectives on the diagnosis, treatment and management of Coronavirus Diseases (COVID-19)

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) or severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, has become the current health concern to the entire world. Initially appeared in Wuhan, China around December 2019, it spread to almost 216 countries due to its high contagious nature, so the World Health Organization recently declared the pandemic feature of the infection. SARS-CoV-2(COVID-19) which is genetically similar to SARS-CoV and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) is an enveloped, single and positive-stranded RNA virus with a genome comprising 29,891 nucleotides, which encode the 12 putative open reading frames responsible for the synthesis of viral structural and nonstructural proteins which are very similar to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV proteins. Currently, there are no approved treatments for COVID-19.  For this reason, we reviewed existing publications about Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) regarding epidemiology, pathophysiology, diagnosis and treatments.

Given the various investigations on the Virus (15928 publications in MEDLINE database, Until May 26, 2020) and various clinical data generated by the large number of laboratories, clinicians need accurate evidence regarding effective medical treatments for this infection. In this review, MEDLINE, SCIENCE DIRECT and Scopus databases were searched for relevant articles.

Since the emergence of COVID-19 infection there was a large interest in the development of an effective therapy for this disease. In this review, we summarized the available literature on possible therapeutic options including in vitro, animal and human studies. This review has presented a picture of the current findings on the epidemiology, clinical features, diagnosis, management, and prevention of COVID-19.

The COVID-19 epidemic represents the world's biggest public health crisis. Clinical trials that have begun to look for potential treatments for COVID-19 are very high, but unfortunately have not yet led to the development of an effective drug. Thus, to overcome on this crisis preventive and coordinated emergency measures between all countries are needed.