In order to provide you with more information regarding the Coronavirus (COVID-19), the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) presents an interview with Professor Cheryl Cohen who is the Head for Respiratory Disease and Meningitis. Professor Cohen says that there “is limited information that has been released in terms of who is at highest risk of getting the infection.” She further states that the Coronavirus “can present with a wide spectrum of illness – from milder disease, to more severe infection of the chest, and even death. … In the more severe cases, most [patients] did seem to have some underlying illness”, also known as ‘co-morbidities’. Patients who are elderly or suffer from heart and lung diseases, among others, are most at risk of suffering more severe forms of COVID-19.
Here are a few facts relating to the novel Coronavirus, or COVID-19:
- The word “corona” means ‘crown’. This group of viruses have a distinct group of spikes visible under a microscope.
- The abbreviation for the new strain of Coronavirus is 2019-nCoV. The ‘n’ stands for “novel”, ‘CoV’ refers to the name of the virus (Coronavirus) and the “2019” indicates the year in which it was first identified.
- The commonly accepted abbreviation is COVID-19.
