ABSTRACT
The corona virus (COVID-19) pandemic, a zoonotic disease transmitted from bat to human originated in Wuhan, China, has rapidly spread to several countries, with various cases having been reported globally. The second wave of the corona virus is spreading like a tsunami and is growing at an alarming rate compared to the first wave. It has been seen that the mutant virus is more transmissible and its incubation period is shorter. This article mainly deals with the number of people affected in the 1st and 2nd waves of COVID-19 in India and other countries. The study included all the cases reported from March 3, 2020 - August 31, 2021. The condition of the USA is even more critical than India, Brazil, Russia, United Kingdom, France, Turkey, Argentina, Italy, and other countries. The US has reported the highest number of cases (38,802,453) while Colombia has reported the lowest number of cases (4,905,258).
ABSTRACT
Favipiravir is an antiviral agent showing activity for the treatment of various life threatening viruses such as Ebola virus, Lassa virus and also recent virus for COVID-19. It is a pyrazine carboxamide derivative with activity against RNA viruses which targets RNA-dependent RNA polymerase enzymes which are necessary for the transcription and replication of viral genomes. The lack of research work and no compendial methods available for the estimation of this drug influenced the current research investigation to give a simple, sensitive, rapid, precise, accurate and robust isocratic high performance liquid chromatographic and UV Spectroscopic method for the determination and quantification of Favipiravir. The elution was done by using SHIMADZU Prominence-i, LC-2030 C system equipped with Shim-Pack GIST C18 (250X 4.6 mm, 5 mu m) column with a mobile phase mixture of 10 mM potassium dihydrogen ortho phosphate buffer (pH 4.0) and acetonitrile in the ratio of 90:10 v/v at a flow rate of 1.0 ml/min. The ultraviolet detection was done at the wavelength of 315 nm by maintaining column temperature at 30 degrees. The total run time was 8.0 min. Calibration plot showed best regression over the concentration range of 10-60 mu g/ml of Favipiravir standard solutions. The LOD and LOQ was found to be 0.18 mu g/ml and 0.53 mu g/ml, respectively. The accuracy of the proposed method was determined by performing recovery studies and was found to be between 99.47-100.80%. The repeatability testing for both sample and standard solutions was found as %RSD<2.0% which is within the acceptable limits showing that the method is precise as well. The proposed method was successfully applied for the marketed formulations of Favipiravir tablets. In addition the main features of the proposed method are economic and eco-friendly with less retention time around 4.622 min.