In the beginning of December 2019, a cluster of persons with a pneumonia of unknown cause was identified in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province and a large city of approximately 11 million persons located in the central region of the People’s Republic of China [7,8]. Between 8 and 18 December 2019 there were 7 cases of pneumonia identified whose clinical features resembled that of a viral pneumonia. The outbreak was initially believed to be linked to the Wuhan Huanan (South China) Seafood Wholesale Market. This market, termed a “wet” market, sells a variety of seafood, cuts of meat, and both live and dead animals in over one thousand stalls in constant close contact; however, whether this market was the origin of the outbreak remains unknown [9]. On 31 December 2019, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) sent a rapid response team to Hubei to work alongside health personnel from the provincial and Wuhan city health departments to conduct an epidemiologic investigation. As the disease was spreading through secondary and tertiary cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) China Country Office was informed on 31 December 2019 of the occurrence of these cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology. During the period from 31 December 2019 to 3 January 2020, 44 patients with pneumonia of unknown etiology were reported by the Chinese authorities to the WHO. On 7 January 2020 investigators in China identified the etiological agent of the epidemic as a previously unknown coronavirus, and it was given the designation 2019-nCoV (for 2019 novel coronavirus) [8]. Analysis of the clinical features of 41 hospitalized patients with laboratory-confirmed 2019-nCoV infection revealed that 30 were men (73%); less than one-half had underlying co-morbid conditions (13; 32%) which included diabetes (8, 20%), hypertension (6, 15%), and cardiovascular disease (6; 15%); and the average age was 49.0 years old. The most common symptoms at the beginning of their illness included fever (40, 98%), cough (31, 76%), and fatigue or myalgia (18, 44%), sputum production (11, 28%), and headache (3, 8%) [10]. Among these 41 initial cases of 2019-nCoV infection there were 12 patients (32%) who developed acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), 13 (32%) required intensive care and 6 (15%) died. During the first weeks of January the infection spread rapidly through China and extended to adjacent countries where cases began to appear—13 January in Thailand, 15 January in Japan, 20 January in the Republic of Korea, and Taiwan and the United States on 21 January [11]. Infected travelers, mostly via commercial air travel, are known to have been responsible for introducing the virus outside of Wuhan. The new coronavirus continued to spread throughout multiple countries and continents, and by 9 February 2020 the WHO reported 37,251 confirmed cases in China that resulted in 812 deaths, surpassing the number of deaths that occurred during the 2002–2003 SARS epidemic. An additional 307 cases of 2019-nCoV infection have occurred among 24 other countries outside of China [12]. (Figure 1) At the meeting of the Emergency Committee of the WHO on 30 January, the novel coronavirus 2019 epidemic was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) [11,13].