JAKARTA - Today March 12, the World Health Organization WHO declared the Covid-19 outbreak to be a pandemic. Meanwhile, on the same day 17 years ago, WHO also announced that the "ancestor" of the corona virus, namely SARS, was a world health issue and urged the world to be vigilant.
The high number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the world has prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare that the virus outbreak has become a pandemic. WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the number of COVID-19 cases outside China increased 13-fold in two weeks. There have been 118,000 cases, more than 4,000 deaths, and the virus has occurred on every continent except Antarctica.
On the same day, 17 years ago WHO, also announced the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus to become a global health issue. SARS or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome is a type of pneumonia.
Quoting the official website of the WHO World Health Organization, the SARS virus which is both named coronavirus (SARS-CoV) was first identified in 2003.SARS-CoV is thought to have originated from bats that spread to other animals such as civets and humans who were infected for the first time in Guangdong Province, southern China in 2002.
The SARS outbreak affected 26 countries and resulted in more than 8,000 cases in 2003. Since then a number of cases have occurred as a result of laboratory accidents or through animal-to-human transmission in Guangdong, China.
Symptoms of this disease resemble influenza, such as fever, headache, diarrhea and chills. Not much different from Covid-19, the SARS virus has no specific symptoms to diagnose SARS. Although fever is the most frequently reported symptom, fever is sometimes absent at initial screening, especially in elderly patients and patients with poor immune systems.
Dry cough, shortness of breath, and diarrhea present in the first or second week of illness. Severe cases often evolve rapidly, progress to respiratory distress and require intensive care.
SARS-CoV mainly spreads from person to person. Most cases of transmission occur in the treatment process, in the absence of adequate infection prevention control measures. Meanwhile the spread ends when proper infection control practices are started.
Initially, this virus spread in Guangdong province, southern China. Sars first spread outside China through imported cases in Toronto, Canada, then to Hong Kong China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hanoi, Vietnam.
Since the end of the pandemic in July 2003, SARS has appeared several times, WHO has recorded four times, namely three times from laboratory accidents in Singapore and Taiwan, and once in southern China where the source of the infection cannot be determined although the evidence refers to the spread of animals.
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