Chapter 7: Covid-19 and its Impact on Medical Research and Society

The emergence and spread of a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 has led to a pandemic with a major impact on global health, world economy, and social behavior. The disease caused by the virus, first described in Wuhan, China, was later named as coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO). It exhibits a wide spectrum of clinical manifestations, ranging from asymptomatic to severe (∼15%) infections and the latter may develop into a critical condition that requires admission to an intensive care unit (Garcia, 2020; Hu, Guo, Zhou, & Shi, 2020). As of April 7, 2021, more than 133 million individuals had been infected world-wide and close to 2.89 million had succumbed to the disease (from the coronavirus resource center at Johns Hopkins University: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html). These striking numbers are continuing to climb and currently many countries across the world are facing a second or even third wave of the infection with record high daily new cases reported. Large numbers of drugs and vaccine candidates are being tested in in vitro assays, animal models and as of 7th April, 92 vaccines and 419 therapeutic drugs are in human clinical trials (https://biorender.com/covid-vaccine-tracker). Several therapies have been approved to treat the disease by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other national or regional authorities, including remdesivir, an antiviral medicine, convalescent plasma therapy and monoclonal antibodies. There is, however, thus far only two immunomodulatory therapies have been found to be effective in large-scale randomized clinical trials, steroids (dexamethasone) and medicine used for treating rheumatoid arthritis (tocilizumab). Several vaccines have been granted for emergency use by FDA and other international and national agencies since December 2020.