EFFECT OF CORONA VIRUS ON GLOBAL ECONOMY

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1    Background to the Study

At present the new name of fear is Coronavirus disease (COVID-19). This is not only killing the people around the world but also causes economic downturn which destroy the country in both ends. Coronaviruses are a group of related viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds. In humans, coronaviruses cause respiratory tract infections that can be mild, such as some cases of the common cold (among other possible causes, predominantly rhinoviruses), and others that can be lethal, such as SARS, MERS, and COVID-19. Basically, it is a very infectious disease which is caused by a new virus, named after Covid-19.

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus, named as COVID-19 (also known as SARSCoV-2) by the World Health Organization (WHO), has been declared a pandemic by the WHO. The rapid ‘globalization’ of the COVID-19 pandemic is something that the world perhaps has never encountered before. The infection of the COVID-19 virus was first reported in December of 2019 in Wuhan – the seventh largest city of China. Among the family of coronaviruses, the other coronaviruses the world encountered before are the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS)and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). Research suggest that the outbreak began from the workers and customers slaughtering animals such as pig, dog, rat, civet cat, rat, and snakes etc. at a wholesale market in Wuhan (Chen et. al., 2020). Once infected by COVID-19, it can cause fever, cough, breathing problem, and in severe cases pneumonia and severe acute respiratory syndrome, heart failure and subsequent death.