Challenges Facing Iraq to Tackle the Spread of COVID-19: An Overview

Abstract

On the 31st of December 2019, China reported several pneumonia-like infections in Wuhan's Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Ten days later, a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) was announced by the Chinese center for disease control (CCDC). At that time, the genome sequence was publicly made available. The genome sequence analysis of the newly identified virus was found similar to 75-80% of the SARS-CoV clade and more than 88% of bat corona viruses. On January 30th, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a state of emergency due to the COVID-19 epidemic. In March 2020, the WHO raised a state of emergency and declared that COVID-19 has become a pandemic. Unfortunately, Iraq confirmed the first cases of COVID-19 in February 2020. On April 25th, 46,135 tests were conducted in Iraq with 1763 positive cases. Although Iraq is making great efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic stimulating all the available capabilities, such as having a full lockdown and teaching people about the sickness danger, the numbers of cases and deaths started to dramatically increase in June. Now, on the 2nd of July, the infection and death cases were around 54 K and 2.2 K, respectively. Herein, we outline the challenges that the Iraqi health sector is facing to control the spread of COVID-19 with procedures followed so far. This could assist in understanding the severity of the situation and end up with a realistic understanding of it.

Keywords

• covid_19
• coronavirus
• pandemic
• sars-cov
• novel coronavirus
• pneumonia