COVID-19: Could it serve as an opportunity to overcome public health challenges of the 21st century?

Abstract

Since the Athenian Plague of 430 B.C. up to the presentday COVID-19 crisis, human beings have lived through various recorded pandemic events that have shaped human history and the basic principles of modern health sciences. This demonstrates the fact that human beings have always lived, and will continue to live, with diseases of diverse magnitude in terms of their impact and coverage (1). The globe continues to be threatened by outbreaks that cost lives, destruct social fabrics, and destroy the economies. The Black Plague of 1325 and the Spanish Flu of 1918 recorded huge human costs. In the past few decades, human beings have suffered from a series of pathogens that belong to the same coronavirus family (SARS-2003, MERS-2012 and COVID-2019). SARS and MERS prevailed and affected populations in the Middle East and Asia, unlike COVID-19, which has proved more expansive to claim a global profile (2,3).