Background: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has questioning origin in Wuhan, an industrial city of China. The novel coronavirus 2 (NCV2) was first identified in December 2019, and World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a global public health emergency on 30 January 2020, officially named it as COVID-19 on February 11 2020, and a pandemic on 11 March 2020. COVID-19 causes physical and mental health problems of variable severity and outcomes among people around the world.
Objective: This study has two aims;1) to conduct a scoping review of COVID-19’s epidemiological trend, clinical manifestations, therapeutics, diagnosis, and progress on vaccine development; and 2) to describe a case series of ten consultees’ and conveniently selected five family units’ mental and physical health effects of COVID-19 over the past 9 months, December to August 31, 2020.
Methods: We used keywords and Boolean Operators for conducting electronic searches of published literature in three largest databases on COVID-19 and regularly received notifications from COVID-19 resource centers, scientific journals, international and national research and economic institutions, and various websites, which helped to retain 82 articles after iterative screening for this review. In addition, 10 cases and the heads of 5 family units were interviewed virtually for assessing the mental and physical health of all family members affected by COVID-19.
Results: COVID-19 pandemic presents with variable clinical manifestations and outcomes attributable to the persons’ immune system, age and gender, physical and mental comorbidities, and adversely affects the biopsychosocial, cultural and economic fabrics of the world population. Basic preventive precautions and nonspecific drug interventions against COVID-19 are relatively effective with inconstant morbidity and mortality, and vaccine development researches (phase I-III) are in progress around the world. All persons in case series, not corona positive except one, presented with mental and physical health problems of wider nature that required integrated treatment interventions while majority of family unit members were less affected mentally or physically by COVID-19 and improved with preventive precautions.
Conclusion: COVID-19 is highly virulent disease linked with variable mental health problems, greater morbidity and mortality, severe strains on healthcare organizations and economic downturn around the world. Despite difficult access to services, overall our case series and family members showed good outcome. Information concerning COVID-19 is continuously evolving and, hence, further scoping reviews, randomized clinical trials and surveys concerning its several perspectives are needed in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Gulf countries.
Improving the physical health of people with mental health problems