The Delta State Commissioner for Higher Education, Prof. Patrick Muoboghare has hailed the Management team of Delta State Polytechnic, Ogwashi-Uku, for producing quality face masks for public use amid the coronavirus pandemic.

He revealed this at Ogwashi-Uku on Friday during his working visit to the institution.

According to him, the fact that the Polytechnic has risen to the occasion to do something to curb the spread of the outbreak is very commendable.

He added that he plans to inform his counterparts in Ministries of Basic and Secondary Education, as well as Technical and Vocational Education, so that they can patronize the institution for the masks for their pupils and students.

His words, “I promised to reach out to my counterparts in Ministries of Basic and Secondary Education,as well as Technical and Vocational Education, so that they can patronize the institution for the items for their pupils and students.

“The producers of the face masks are former students of the Polytechnic who were only engaged on Thursday last week and after two days, had produced such large quantity of the items for the public.”

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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.