Coronavirus (COVID-19) Collection
Human respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, circulating in the winter season 2019–2020 in Parma, Northern Italy
Viral infections of the upper and lower respiratory tracts are among the most common illnesses in humans. They occur mainly in children and infants, who can experience up to five to six episodes in any given year (Berry et al., 2015). For this reason, acute respiratory infections (ARIs) represent a persistent public health problem. Although the majority of ARIs remain confined to the upper respiratory tract (rhinosinusitis, pharyngitis, laryngitis, and tracheitis), they can cause severe manifestations when they affect the lower respiratory tract (bronchitis, bronchiolitis, and pneumonia) (Bicer et al., 2013; Tregoning and Schwarze, 2010; Zappa et al., 2008).Ascertainment rate of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Japan
As of March 1, 2020, a total of 58 countries had reported at least one confirmed case of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), and the cumulative number of deaths had reached 2977 persons across the world (WHO, 2020). To achieve appropriate countermeasures, it is vital to understand the current epidemiological situations of the COVID-19 epidemic.The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak: What we know
Coronaviruses (CoVs), a large family of single-stranded RNA viruses, can infect animals and also humans, causing respiratory, gastrointestinal, hepatic, and neurologic diseases (Weiss and Leibowitz, 2013). As the largest known RNA viruses, CoVs are further divided into four genera: alpha-coronavirus, beta- coronavirus, gamma-coronavirus and delta-coronavirus (Yang and Leibowitz, 2015). To date, there have been six human coronaviruses (HCoVs) identified, including the alpha-CoVs HCoVs-NL63 and HCoVs-229E and the beta-CoVs HCoVs-OC43, HCoVs-HKU1, severe acute respiratory syndrome-CoV (SARS-CoV) (Drosten et al., 2020), and Middle East respiratory syndrome-CoV (MERS-CoV) (Zaki et al., 2012).
