A Review on Interventions against COVID-19

Abstract

COVID-19 remains the main public health problem in the world. The major objective of this review is to discuss interventions that have been employed against COVID-19. The preventive and control measures that have been employed against COVID-19 include: staying at home, social and physical distancing, quarantine, washing hand with sanitizer, using face mask, immunization, timely diagnosis and treatment of the disease. In spite of its high false negative rate, real time-PCR remains the gold standard for diagnosis of COVID-19. Antiviral drugs that have been approved for treatment of COVID-19 include remedsvier, monoclonal antibodies and convalescent plasma therapy. The vaccines that were authorized and approved for COVID-19 have shown positive outcomes. For example, a vaccine efficacy studies that done in Israel on efficacies of Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines showed that the two vaccines reduce SARS-CoV-2 infection rate by more than 90%. However, it is still possible for fully vaccinated people to contract and spread SARS-CoV-2 because of the high mutation rate of SARS-CoV-2. As the SARS-CoV-2 is constantly changing by random mutation, modification of the current vaccines is required to develop effective vaccines against all variants of the virus. In addition, as the available COVID-19 diagnosis methods have considerable limitations, a novel diagnostic approach that may overcome the limitations has to be designed.