**Abstract**

The coronavirus pandemic, known as COVID-19, is an evolving pandemic caused by a coronavirus, the SARS-CoV-2. The virus was first detected in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. In January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) notified this upsurge as an international emergency concerning public health. It was declared a pandemic later in March 2020. By May 12, 2021, 160,363,284 cases had been registered, and 3,332,762 deaths have been reported, caused by COVID-19, characterized as a horrific pandemic in the history of humankind. Scientists have reached a consensus about the origin of COVID-19, a zoonotic virus arising from bats or other animals in a natural habitat. The economic impact of this outbreak has left far-reaching repercussions on world business transactions, along with bond, commodity, and stock markets. One of the crucial incidents that popped up was the oil price war among OPEC countries. It caused plummeting oil prices and the collapse of stock markets globally in March 2020, as the OPEC agreement failed. However, COVID-19 plays a crucial role in the economic recession. The monetary deficit impact on the travel and trade industries is likely to be huge, in billions of pounds, increasing daily. Other sectors have also suffered significantly.

**Keywords:** pandemic, COVID-19, zoonotic virus, economic impact, economic recession

## **1. Introduction**

#### **1.1 Historical background**

Coronavirus (CoV) was tracked down in the 1960s. The Coronavirus Study Group, patronized by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV), applied the principle of comparative genomics to further evaluate and segregate the reproductive proteins on open reading frames to identify the variables that convert CoV at varying cluster ranks. CoVs are linked to diseases of different magnitudes. SARS (in 2002–2003) and MERS (in 2012) were the most severe types causing far-reaching pandemics.

Recently, people worldwide have been hugely impacted by COVID-19; it holds the fifth rank as a pandemic since its inception following the 1918 Spanish flu. Since late December 2019, there were possible warning signs followed by the flare-up because of unusual pneumonia incidences in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The symptoms of this complex disease in patients suffering from fever, malaise, dry cough, and dyspnea have been identified as viral pneumonia [1, 2], termed by the press, in the first instance, as Wuhan pneumonia, because of its association

with its symptoms. A comprehensive analysis of the entire genomes has concluded that the outbreak has been caused by the novel coronavirus that has earned the 7th rank as a member of the coronavirus family that infects human beings [3]. The WHO temporarily used terminology for this latest virus as 2019-nCoV on January 12, 2020; soon after, this infectious ailment was officially named COVID-19 on February 12, 2020. Based on phylogeny, taxonomy, and established practices, a subsequent designation for this virus has been considered SARS-CoV-2 by the ICTV [4]. Eventually, the people-to-people transmission of COVID-19 in Hong Kong was identified in the clinical data [5]. As COVID-19 first cropped up in a Chinese city, it gradually developed in four months and swiftly flared up to other parts as a worldwide emergency. Finally, on March 11, 2020, the WHO evaluated COVID-19 as a pandemic, followed by the 1918 Spanish flu, 1957 Asian flu, 1968 Hong Kong flu, and 2009 Pandemic flu. All these pandemics exterminated about 55.5 million people collectively (**Figure 1**) [6–9].
