Multifaceted Medical and Scientific Approaches and the Role of the Public in Combating the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Digital Era

Epidemics and pandemics have been recurrent in history. One of the worst pandemics in the modern history was the 1918 H1N1 fl u (“Spanish fl u”) that claimed the lives of an estimated 50 million people globally [1]. The current pandemic, a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), the etiologic agent of COVID-19, was first reported in the city of Wuhan (China) in December 2019. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), at the time of writing, there were over 84 million confirmed cases and over 1.8 million deaths in 218 countries linked to COVID-19 [2], and the numbers of cases continue to climb globally. The viral transmission has been reported as predominantly horizontal while reports of vertical transmission have been limited [3]. The impact of COVID-19 on morbidity, mortality, lifestyle changes, and trillions of dollars loss in the economy is unprecedented in the modern history. There are significant synergies and a concerted role for multifaceted medical and scientific approaches to be utilized to engage the public in combating COVID-19 effectively