2020: The year of global health success
Good morning to my esteemed readers and hope you are staying safe and following your local public health guidelines. Today, I reflect on the challenges and success of 2020 as seen from the global health perspective. You may be surprised to see my title of "global health success" in a year of pandemic, but, read on to see my perspective. It is no doubt 2020 will go down as one of the global health challenging years in recent centuries. The most important occurrence of the year is the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 is a disease caused by one of the families of coronaviruses called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-coronavirus-2 or SARS-Cov-2 virus, which when infected, causes severe respiratory disorder (first reported in 2019), hence the name COVID-19. The virus was first "discovered" in Ruhan Province of China allegedly from human-animal interaction in the city's animal market. Now, whereas coronaviruses are not new, there are mostly present in animals inclu...