The COVID -19 Pandemic and Research in Resource-Limited Settings

Abstract

In December 2019, distant murmurs were heard of a possible zoonotic virus somewhere in a wet market in Wuhan, China. Subsequently, alarm bells began to ring when the first human-to-human transmission of a novel Coronavirus was reported in January 2020. Pakistan reported its first case on February 26 and found itself in the midst of the global pandemic of the SARS-CoV-2, Covid-19. In Pakistan, like every other country, health-care workers have found themselves in the eye of the storm; as this editorial is being written, approximately 249,000 cases have been diagnosed and more than 5000 have succumbed to the  pandemic. Like the rest of the world, we also lived through an early scramble to save lives and obtain the basic needs for patients e.g. a face mask or oxygen, yet the importance of local research could not be and, even now, cannot be underscored enough to go hand-in-hand with the clinical needs of patients.