ABSTRACT
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2. It has affected over 200 countries and inflicted significant mortalities as well as disrupted the normal social and economic processes. In the absence of an established effective vaccination, the cornerstone of COVID-19 management largely depends on containment and mitigation strategies. However, it is increasingly felt that digital health can be widely used to facilitate COVID-19 pandemic management effectively, which is otherwise difficult to attain manually. Many countries depended on health technology to contain the impact of the virus. However, Singapore, a small country in the South-East Asian region demonstrated exemplary pandemic preparedness skills coupled with adoption of digital health technology to attain remarkable success in containing the virus. © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Coronaviruses (CoVs) are pathogens that threaten human health. Several CoVs are maintained in nature, recombine, mutate, evolve, and emerge as novel CoVs to cause new zoonotic diseases. CoVs infection displays immense interindividual clinical variability, varying from asymptomatic to severe. Risk factors, such as older age, underlying health conditions, and the human genome could address the disease’s variable symptoms. The possible association between disease severity and DNA polymorphisms in the virus-host factors presents a unique opportunity to reveal human genetic determinants in infection and disease susceptibility. This chapter emphasizes the history, taxonomy, naming, genetic diversity of CoVs, the genome of CoVs, and potential genes for diseases’ pathogenesis. This information can help to prepare countermeasures against future spillover and pathogenic infections in humans with novel CoVs. © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.