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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Global epidemiology of coronavirus disease 2019 and lessons for effective control of this and future pandemics

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Barely 1 year after severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) was first reported in China, the virus has infected approximately 120 million people, caused around 3 million deaths, and adversely affected the global economy Despite stringent measures to flatten the epidemiologic curve of the pandemic, there have been spikes and waves of the infection in many countries, particularly in the American, European, and Asian continents This review critically evaluated the global epidemiology of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) to provide advice on other possible ways of managing the disease as various COVID-19 vaccines are being rolled out To effectively control this and possible future epidemics/pandemics, there is a need to maintain a healthy balance between saving lives and livelihoods in the implementation of lockdowns Unwarranted human exposures to animals, particularly pangolins, civet cats, bats, dromedary camels, and other wildlife known to be reservoirs and intermediate hosts of coronaviruses should be prevented All the identified strains of SARS-CoV-2, including the highly infectious UK and South African variants, should be incorporated in COVID-19 vaccine production;to widen the protection spectrum Some of the COVID-19 vaccines require primary inoculation, booster vaccination after 2-4 weeks and annual revaccination for adequate immunization against SARS-CoV-2 Survivors of COVID-19 may require only a single vaccine dozing and annual revaccination thereafter Adoption of One Health approach and the development of globally coordinated active surveillance systems against emerging and reemerging zoonotic viruses are imperative © Njoga, et al This article is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4 0 International License (http://creativecommons org/licenses/by/4 0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons org/publicdomain/zero/1 0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated