Introduction

The twenty-first century is the century of major pandemics and virus outbreaks. In this century, there were many pandemics that had occurred, i.e. Spanish flu: 1918–1920 from the South Seas to the North Pole, Asian flu: 1957–1958 in Singapore, Hong Kong and the United States, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS): 1981 to present day in West Africa; after that, there are various influenza virus outbreaks like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), H1N1 influenza pandemic (2009–2010), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) (2012), Ebola pandemic (2014–2016), Zika virus (ZIKV) (2015), Nipah virus, cholera, yellow fever (YF), Lassa fever and the ongoing coronavirus (2019). Bats are being increasingly recognized as an important reservoir of zoonotic viruses of different families, including SARS, coronavirus, Nipah virus, Hendra virus and Ebola virus (Smith & Wang, 2013). Pandemics are large-scale outbreaks of infectious disease that can greatly increase morbidity and mortality over a wide geographic area and cause significant economic, social and political disruption (Madhav et al., 2017). Ebola is one of the deadliest infectious diseases of the modern era. Over 50% of those infected die (LaBrunda & Amin, 2020). As at September 2015, the recent Ebola virus disease (EBV) in West Africa has led to 11,306 deaths out of 28,200 cases reported from 10 countries (Naa, Lokko, & Lokko, 2016). The first introduction of ZIKV to Brazil likely occurred between August 2013 and April 2014 (90% credible interval) (Zhang et al., 2017). ZIKV has been one of the major international public health concerns following large outbreaks in the Americas occurring in 2015–2016 (Desai, Hartman, Jayarajan, Liu, & Ian Gallicano, 2017). Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is a mosquito-transmitted alphavirus belonging to the Togaviridae family, first isolated in Tanzania in 1952 (Caglioti et al., 2013). The new coronavirus strain called ‘2019-nCoV’ is believed to have an incubation period of 2 to 14 days, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.