The Environmental Drivers of COVID-19

In the past decade, humanity’s technological advancement has brought enormous ease in day-to-day activities but advancement has not been without its challenges or drawbacks. The possibility of an epidemic escalating into a worldwide pandemic might have risen due to how easy it is to buy and sell commodities, and the frequency of cross-border transport. Today, there are growing concerns about the threats the upsurge of viral infections poses to the global population—one of such infections is the novel coronavirus disease 2019 usually abbreviated as COVID-19. The causative agent of COVID-19 is the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The International Committee of Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) named the virus SARS-CoV-2 because it is genetically linked to the coronavirus that was responsible for the SARS outbreak in 2003. Coronaviruses are a large family of RNA viruses that can cause mild infections in the upper respiratory tract, like the common cold. They can also cause more serious lower respiratory tract infections like pneumonia, bronchitis or severe respiratory illnesses like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). Although SARS and MERS have remarkably higher case fatality rates (CFR or the ratio of deaths caused by a particular disease to the number of confirmed cases of the same disease) than COVID-19, the total number of confirmed deaths (256,880 at 06 May) far exceeds that from SARS or MERS, because it is more infectious and easily spreads among people.