The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been identified as the cause of an outbreak of respiratory illness in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China beginning in December 2019. As of 31 January 2020, this epidemic had spread to 19 countries with 11 791 confirmed cases, including 213 deaths. The World Health Organization has declared it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Methods
A scoping review was conducted following the methodological framework suggested by Arksey and O’Malley. In this scoping review, 65 research articles published before 31 January 2020 were analyzed and discussed to better understand the epidemiology, causes, clinical diagnosis, prevention and control of this virus. The research domains, dates of publication, journal language, authors’ affiliations, and methodological characteristics were included in the analysis. All the findings and statements in this review regarding the outbreak are based on published information as listed in the references. Results
Most of the publications were written using the English language (89.2%). The largest proportion of published articles were related to causes (38.5%) and a majority (67.7%) were published by Chinese scholars. Research articles initially focused on causes, but over time there was an increase of the articles related to prevention and control. Studies thus far have shown that the virus’ origination is in connection to a seafood market in Wuhan, but specific animal associations have not been confirmed. Reported symptoms include fever, cough, fatigue, pneumonia, headache, diarrhea, hemoptysis, and dyspnea. Preventive measures such as masks, hand hygiene practices, avoidance of public contact, case detection, contact tracing, and quarantines have been discussed as ways to reduce transmission. To date, no specific antiviral treatment has proven effective; hence, infected people primarily rely on symptomatic treatment and supportive care. Conclusions
There has been a rapid surge in research in response to the outbreak of COVID-19. During this early period, published research primarily explored the epidemiology, causes, clinical manifestation and diagnosis, as well as prevention and control of the novel coronavirus. Although these studies are relevant to control the current public emergency, more high-quality research is needed to provide valid and reliable ways to manage this kind of public health emergency in both the short- and long-term. Background
The coronavirus belongs to a family of viruses that may cause various symptoms such as pneumonia, fever, breathing difficulty, and lung infection [1]. These viruses are common in animals worldwide, but very few cases have been known to affect humans. The World Health Organization (WHO) used the term 2019 novel coronavirus to refer to a coronavirus that affected the lower respiratory tract of patients with pneumonia in Wuhan, China on 29 December 2019 [2,3,4]. The WHO announced that the official name of the 2019 novel coronavirus is coronavirus disease (COVID-19) [4]. And the current reference name for the virus is severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). It was reported that a cluster of patients with pneumonia of unknown cause was linked to a local Huanan South China Seafood Market in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China in December 2019 [5]. In response to the outbreak, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) dispatched a rapid response team to accompany health authorities of Hubei province and Wuhan city to conduct epidemiological and etiological investigations. The WHO confirmed that the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic was associated with the Huanan South China Seafood Marketplace, but no specific animal association was identified [6]. Scientists immediately started to research the source of the new coronavirus, and the first genome of COVID-19 was published by the research team led by Prof. Within 1 month, this virus spread quickly throughout China during the Chinese New Year – a period when there is a high level of human mobility among Chinese people. Although it is still too early to predict susceptible populations, early patterns have shown a trend similar to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronaviruses. Susceptibility seems to be associated with age, biological sex, and other health conditions [8]. COVID-19 has now been declared as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the WHO [9]. Given the spread of the new coronavirus and its impacts on human health, the research community has responded rapidly to the new virus and many preliminary research articles have already been published about this epidemic (Additional file 1). We conducted a scoping review to summarize and critically analyze all the published scientific articles regarding the new coronavirus in January 2020. This review aims to provide the evidence of early findings on the epidemiology, causes, clinical diagnosis, as well as prevention and control of COVID-19 in relation to time, location, and source of publication. This review can provide meaningful information for future research related to this topic and may support government decision-making on strategies to handle this public health emergency at the community, national, and international levels. Methods
Study design
A scoping review was conducted following the methodological framework suggested by Arksey and O’Malley [10]. The following five steps were followed to conduct this scoping review: a) identifying a clear research objective and search strategies, b) identifying relevant research articles, c) selection of research articles, d) extraction and charting of data, and e) summarizing, discussing, analyzing, and reporting the results. Literature search strategies
Literature for this review was identified by searching the following online databases: bioRxiv, medRxiv, ChemRxiv, Google scholar, PubMed, as well as CNKI and WanFang Data (the two primary databases for biomedical research in mainland China). These online databases contain archives of most English and Chinese biomedical journals. In addition, some white papers published online by the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, Chinese Center for Disease Prevention and Control, and the WHO were included in the analysis. We searched scientific publications from 1 January to 31 January 2020. The search terms were ‘nCoV’, ‘2019 novel coronavirus’, ‘2019-nCoV’, ‘novel coronavirus’, ‘Pneumonia’, ‘新型冠状病毒’ (Chinese), ‘新型肺炎’ (Chinese), and ‘新冠病毒’ (Chinese). We included all the relevant scientific publications written in English or Chinese in the review. Non-scientific commentary, reports, and news articles were excluded from the analysis. Identification and selection of relevant studies
Two researchers (YW and SPA) independently searched through the literature. The two sets of literature were then compared. Disagreements on the inclusion or exclusion of literature were resolved through discussion or, if necessary, by including a third researcher (HZ) to make the final decision. Duplicate articles were eliminated. Eventually, 65 unique academic publications were included in this analysis (Additional file 1). Figure 1 presents a Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) flow diagram showing the process of searching and selecting the research articles
