Introduction:

SARS-CoV-2 was recently isolated from human airway epithelial cells in January 2020. This virus has caused a pandemic that challenges the global public health infrastructure.

Objective:

to review the available bibliography on COVID-19.

Methods:

a systematic review of publications in Medline and PubMed databases was performed using the following key words: COVID-19, COVID-2019, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, 2019-nCoV, SARS-CoV-2, 2019-nCoV, Wuhan, and coronavirus.

Conclusions:

there were selected forty-two publications which were important to understand the pathogenic characteristics of COVID-19 in the context of the pandemic declared by the World Health Organization.