Treating COVID-19 with Chloroquine

Abstract

Treating COVID-19 with Chloroquine A novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) emerged around December 2019 in Wuhan, China and has spread rapidly worldwide (Lu et al., 2020). Until March 27, 2020, the Chinese health authorities had reported 82082 confirmed COVID-19 cases in China with 3298 deaths and 381443 confirmed cases with 20787 deaths outside China. The World Health Organization (WHO) named the virus SARS-CoV-2, which belongs to a distinct clade from the human severe acute respiratory syndrome CoV (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome CoV (MERS-CoV) (Zhu et al., 2020). At present, there is no effective therapy against this new virus. Identifying effective antiviral agents to treat the COVID-19 is of most urgency.