LAUSR

The country office of the World Health Organization (WHO), was informed of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, a city in the Hubei Province of China, on 31 December 2019. All reported cases were associated with Wuhan’s seafood market. Laboratory investigations indicated that the reported pneumonia was caused by a novel coronavirus. The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) named the novel coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The WHO subsequently named the disease caused by the Coronavirus, ‘COVID-19’. As the number of COVID-19 cases in China and internationally increased, the WHO held an emergency meeting on 30 January 2020, declaring the COVID-19 outbreak a public health emergency of global concern. As of 20 June 2020, the number of internationally reported cases reached 8,525,042, with a 52.90% recovery rate and a less than 10% mortality rate. By then, the largest number of cases had been reported in the United States of America (USA); 2,330,578, with a 41% recovery rate and a 5% mortality rate. In the Eastern Mediterranean Region, the largest number of cases were reported in the Islamic Republic of Iran, followed by KSA. In Iran, 202,584 cases were reported, with a recovery rate of 79.70% and a mortality rate of 4.70%. In KSA, 154,233 cases were reported, with a recovery rate of 64.1% and a less than 1% mortality rate.