Impact of potential COVID-19 treatment on South African water sources already threatened by pharmaceutical pollution

Abstract

AAfter a cluster of human pneumonia cases in Wuhan City (China) on 7 January 2020, a novel coronavirus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2), was identified as the causative agent of the disease COVID‐19 (World Health Organization 2020). It quickly became a global pandemic and continues to rapidly spread across the world, having infected almost 4 million confirmed cases and caused more than 265 000 deaths at time of publication, far surpassing the total cases of SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)