International Field
Hubei in Wuhan, China is the news epicenter of a pandemic when in December 2019, a group of patients went to different hospitals with diagnoses of pneumonia of unknown etiology (Wang, Horby, Hayden & Gao, 2020). The first five cases were reported between December 18th and 29th, 2019, four of which were hospitalized for showing acute respiratory distress syndrome and one of the patients died (Du Toit, 2020; Kour and Hirschhaut, 2020). The epidemiology of the disease was linked to a wholesale market of fish, sea food and live and not processed animals of this province, since most of the patients assured to have had direct or indirect relation to this food market (Bogoch, et al., 2020; Lu, Stratton and Tang, 2020).
By January 2020, the Wuhan market had been closed and there was no clear evidence of person to person transmission. On January 2nd, a total of 41 patients had been hospitalized and only one had died, who showed serious pre-existing pathologies. On January 7th, Chinese authorities announced that they had identified a new type of coronavirus (New Coronavirus, 2019-nCoV) (Kour et al., 2020).
Since then, the number of people infected has increased exponentially in Continental China and by January 30th, 9,692 cases had been reported in all China and 90 cases in different countries including Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Malesia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Japan, Singapore, the Republic of Korea, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Philippines, India, Iran, Australia, Canada, Finland, France and Germany (Rothan & Byrareddy, 2020; Wang, Tang & Wei, 2020).
The first case report in North America was on January 19, 2020 in the State of Washington, United States of America; a 35-year-old male patient with a history of cough and fever, who went to a health facility searching for medical attention. His background showed a family visit trip to Wuhan, China (Holshue, 2020). Likewise, on January 24th, the first case of COVID-19 was reported in Europe, specifically in Bordeaux, France, of a patient with a recent history of having travelled to China (Provenzano, 2020). On February 26th, the Minister of Health of Brazil reported the first case of COVID 19 in South America; a 61 years old male from São Paulo, who showed mild symptoms and went into quarantine, with history of having recently travelled to Lombardy, Italy (De S. Paulo, 2020). On March 11th, with 118,000 cases reported in 114 countries and 4,291 people dead, the World Health Organization declared that the outbreak of the Coronavirus 19 disease caused by SARS-CoV2 is considered to be a pandemic (World Health Organization, 2020).