The World Health Organization is offering a free on-demand (self-paced) course providing a general introduction to nCoV and emerging respiratory viruses aimed at public health professionals, incident managers and personnel working for the United Nations, international organizations and NGOs.

The course is part of an interactive, web-based, knowledge-transfer platform called OpenWHO offering online courses to improve the response to health emergencies. OpenWHO aims to transfer life-saving knowledge to large numbers of frontline responders to better contain disease outbreaks and manage health emergencies. It also aims to foster discussions, feedback and sharing of expert knowledge on public health.

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are known to cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

A novel coronavirus (CoV) was identified in 2019 in Wuhan, China. This is a new coronavirus that has not been previously identified in humans.

This course provides a general introduction to nCoV and emerging respiratory viruses and is intended for public health professionals, incident managers and personnel working for the United Nations, international organizations and NGOs.

Course information Overview: This course provides a general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses. By the end of this course, you should be able to describe:

The nature of emerging respiratory viruses, how to detect and assess an outbreak, strategies for preventing and controlling outbreaks due to novel respiratory viruses;

What strategies should be used to communicate risk and engage communities to detect, prevent and respond to the emergence of a novel respiratory virus.

Module A: Introduction to Emerging respiratory viruses, including nCoV:Overall learning objective: To be able to explain why an emerging respiratory virus, including nCoV are a global threat to human health

Module B: Detecting Emerging respiratory viruses, including nCoV: Surveillance and Laboratory investigation

The course is free. Just register for an account on OpenWHO and take the course.