The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Kwara Chapter, has come out to beg Christians to continue praying fervently to God against the Coronavirus pandemic ravaging the world.

Mr Shina Ibiyemi, the CAN spokesman in the state, revealed this as he spoke with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday in Ilorin.

According to him, their members have been meeting to pray for Nigeria after the directives of the state government on partial lockdown aimed at curtailing the spread of coronavirus.

He added that CAN has also been offering various palliatives to members to reduce the effect of the stay-at-home order in Kwara.

Prophetess Abosede Adimabua, the former Chairperson of the Women Wing of the Christian Association of Nigeria (WOWICAN) added, “We thank God, He has been faithful in protecting us and we have heard of improvement all over.

“We are calling on people to be sober before God, confess their sins, so that God can heal the land.”

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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.