Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) newly updated situation report on March 18th, 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has confirmed 191,127 cases and claimed 7807 deaths worldwide. 1 The etiological agent of COVID-19 has been identified as a novel coronavirus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), belonging to Sarbecovirus subgenus (genus Betacoronavirus , family Coronaviridae ) and showing 79.6 and 96.2% sequence identity in nucleotide to SARS-CoV and a bat coronavirus (BatCoV RaTG13), respectively. 2 , 3 , 4 Like SARS-CoV infection, a substantial fraction of COVID-19 patients exhibits severe respiratory symptoms and has to be hospitalized in intensive care unit. 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 Although the mortality rate of COVID-19 is significantly lower than that of SARS-CoV infection, SARS-CoV-2 shows much higher human-to-human transmission rate, rapidly leading to a global pandemic declared by WHO on March 11th, 2020. 9
Chen et al. (Mon,) studied this question.