Ex PDP Delta State Governorship aspirant, Chief Sunny Onuesoke has come out to tell rural dwellers to not confuse the ravaging coronavirus pandemic with malaria.

Sunny recently revealed that the coronavirus is a deadly disease that spread from person to person via contact with a carrier of the virus and people in our rural communities should learn to comply with guidelines from the government during this period.

According to him, all laws on social distancing, especially in designated market places should be obeyed because that is the only way we can contain the spread of the virus in the country.

He added that all hands must be on deck to check the spread of the dreaded disease in the country since our future is at stake.

His words, “More should be done in enlightening rural dwellers, especially in designated market places that COVID-19 is a killer disease and not like our everyday malaria fever that should be taken lightly.

“From all indications, most rural communities have not fully come to terms with the dangers associated with social gathering as a quick and fast way of spreading the virus and that is very worrisome because it portends great danger if measures are not taken to check this negative trend”.

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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. Symptoms in other species vary: in chickens, they cause an upper respiratory tract disease, while in cows and pigs they cause diarrhea. There are yet to be vaccines or antiviral drugs to prevent or treat human coronavirus infections.

Coronaviruses constitute the subfamily Orthocoronavirinae, in the family Coronaviridae, order Nidovirales, and realm Riboviria. They are enveloped viruses with a positive-sense single-stranded RNA genome and a nucleocapsid of helical symmetry. The genome size of coronaviruses ranges from approximately 27 to 34 kilobases, the largest among known RNA viruses. The name coronavirus is derived from the Latin corona, meaning “crown” or “halo”, which refers to the characteristic appearance reminiscent of a crown or a solar corona around the virions (virus particles) when viewed under two-dimensional transmission electron microscopy, due to the surface covering in club-shaped protein spikes.

Human coronaviruses were first discovered in the late 1960s. The earliest ones discovered were an infectious bronchitis virus in chickens and two in human patients with the common cold (later named human coronavirus 229E and human coronavirus OC43). Other members of this family have since been identified, including SARS-CoV in 2003, HCoV NL63 in 2004, HKU1 in 2005, MERS-CoV in 2012, and SARS-CoV-2 (formerly known as 2019-nCoV) in 2019. Most of these have involved serious respiratory tract infections.