Otorhinolaryngologists and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
Geraldo Pereira Jotz, Richard Louis Voegels, Ricardo Ferreira Bento
Abstract
City, the capital of Hubei province in China, became the center of an outbreak of pneumonia of unknown etiology. By January 7, 2020, Chinese scientists had isolated a novel coronavirus: severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2; previously known as 2019-nCoV), from patients with viral pneumonia (COVID-19). ue to the Public Health Emergency of International Importance declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) on January 30, 2020, caused by SARS-CoV-2 and the confirmation of the first cases of COVID-19 in Brazil (2 confirmed cases in the state of So Paulo by February 29, 2020), the Brazilian Association of Otorhinolaryngology and Cervico-Facial Surgery (Associao Brasileira de Otorrinolaringologia e Cirurgia Cervico-Facial, ABORL, in Portuguese) made a public announcement to guide otorhinolaryngologists in care protocols in their offices. oronaviruses are a relatively common family of respiratory viruses and the second most frequent cause of common cold after rhinoviruses. In the recent decades, they have been related to more serious outbreaks, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002 and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2012. here are seven identified coronaviruses that affect humans. The most common are coronavirus 229E and NL63 and coronavirus OC43 and HKU1, the viruses responsible for the SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV outbreaks respectively. Recently, a novel coronavirus has been identified, which was initially named 2019-nCoV and then SARS-CoV-2 on February 11, 2020, as it was found to be genetically related to SARS-CoV. The disease caused by the new coronavirus was named COVID-19.