For interactive Coronavirus COVID-19 Map by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns <click here>
Cases of Covid-19 first emerged in late 2019, when a mysterious illness was reported in Wuhan, China. The cause of the disease was soon confirmed as a new kind of coronavirus, and the infection has since spread to many countries around the world and become a pandemic.
On 11 February the World Health Organization announced that the official name would be covid-19, a shortened version of coronavirus disease 2019. The WHO refers to the specific virus that causes this disease as the covid-19 virus.
This is not the formal name for the virus – the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses calls it the “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2”, or SARS-CoV-2, because it is related to the virus that caused the SARS outbreak in 2003. However, to avoid confusion with SARS the WHO calls it the covid-19 virus when communicating with the public.
Early in the outbreak, the virus was called 2019-nCoV by the WHO. The virus is also often referred to as the novel coronavirus, 2019 coronavirus or just the coronavirus.