Official government website of the Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 
On Tuesday morning, 1/7/1441 A.H., the University, represented by the College of Medicine, held an educational seminar entitled "The New Coronavirus and Methods of Prevention" in the main lobby of the University City, under the patronage of His Excellency Prof. Abdulrahman bin Hamad Al-Dawood, who honored the participants in the seminar from specialists and consultants from inside and outside the university.
The educational seminar addressed the characteristics of the new disease, how it spreads, the difference between it and other types of coronaviruses, and the reasons for the global reaction to this disease, as this seminar comes out of the university's role in serving the community, and to serve and educate all its groups, as well as university affiliates in particular.
For his part, the Dean of the College of Medicine, Dr. Ahmed Al-Amrou, explained that the novel coronavirus is one of the coronavirus species known to be widespread, causing diseases ranging from the common cold to more severe ailments such as Middle East syndrome and severe acute respiratory syndrome: Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), noting that this virus appeared on December 31, 2019, when the WHO Regional Office in China was informed of cases of pneumonia causing an unknown disease detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China.
"Al-Amrou" added that the announcement of the new coronavirus, as the virus causing these cases by the Chinese authorities, was made on January 7, 2020, and since that time, according to the Ministry of Health website, the number of confirmed cases has reached about seventy-nine thousand cases, including seventy-seven thousand in China, and the rest in the countries of the world, as thirteen cases were recorded in the United Arab Emirates, three cases in Kuwait, another case in Bahrain, and about 2,700 deaths were recorded.
The Dean of the College of Medicine explained that thanks to God's grace and then the Kingdom's efforts, no case has been recorded inside the Kingdom, which is evidence of the effort made by the state and the concerned sectors, led by the Ministry of Health, which always seeks to maintain health security inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, praying to God to keep it safe and secure.
Dr. Saeed Al-Qarni, Director of the National Center for Disease Prevention and Control in Jeddah, spoke about the Center's preparations for the COVID-19 pandemic. He also discussed the idea of establishing the Center and its vision, which aims to contribute to the reduction, monitoring, follow-up and prevention of communicable and non-communicable diseases, as well as health promotion, by conducting research and studies in the field of prevention and control of communicable and non-communicable diseases.
He pointed out the preparedness plans carried out by the center through the command and control center, which checks the readiness of hospitals, reviews the occupancy rate of beds and the number of medical staff in each region, follows up on rumors and news and develops an urgent plan to respond to them and increase community awareness
Al-Qarni also touched on the center's role in reviewing the process of transferring samples and conducting tests at the national laboratory, assessing the availability of medical supplies on a daily basis in all regions of the Kingdom, as well as ensuring the readiness of rapid intervention teams to deal with positive cases, and reviewing the available scientific developments and making decisions based on them.
Al-Qarni talked about the preparedness plan for educational facilities in universities and schools, through which he adopts policies that help students and educational staff to stay at home in case they are exposed to an illness with flu-like symptoms, promote hand washing programs among students and educational staff, make preparations to prepare places in the educational facility to isolate infected people, try to reduce crowding by making operational plans to prevent crowding and increase natural ventilation in the facility, intensify cleaning and sterilization work in the learning environment, spread awareness messages to students and educational staff, and provide supplies and services.
For his part, Prof. Dr. Musaed Ahmed Al-Dhabib, Professor of Virology at the University's College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, spoke about the genetic mutation of coronaviruses, which provided a complete picture of the definition of the virus, in addition to talking about the impact of viruses that infect humans in the emergence of disease symptoms, as he emphasized that viruses are of two types: DNA viruses and RNA viruses, indicating the reason why RNA viruses mutate genetically, resulting in continuous mutations, as well as coronaviruses and genetic mutation, the DNA of coronaviruses, the triggers of genetic mutation of coronaviruses, and the source of coronaviruses in humans.
After that, Dr. Hani bin Ali Al-Malki, a member of the training staff of the Joint Preventive Medicine Fellowship Program in Makkah, spoke about his research paper titled Novel Coronavirus: Impact, Impact, and Response, where he addressed the dynamics of the spread, why the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency as an official declaration of a public health crisis that is likely to have a global expansion, and what the crisis is.
Al-Maliki explained that this announcement comes because the organization fears the expansion of the virus to countries with health systems with limited resources and capabilities, and to avoid increasing the social and economic burden and depletion of resources, and to enable the organization to learn about public health measures in various countries of the world, and reduce the impact of strict measures and travel restrictions on the global economy, in addition to talking about the economic effects, which confirmed that according to the World Health Organization, the world will cost $ 675 million to support the response plans from February to April 2020.
During the seminar, Dr. Abdulrahman Muneeallah Al-Saadi, an infectious diseases consultant from King Abdulaziz Medical City, National Guard, spoke about the signs of infection with the new coronavirus, and how to deal with it inside hospitals, as he addressed rapid diagnosis methods and the information revolution, the acceleration of the spread of the virus in China, the spread of the new virus in the world, the evacuation of Saudi students from Wuhan, in addition to presenting the group of coronaviruses that infect humans, presenting the mortality rate in the presence of chronic diseases, as well as the signs of infection with the new coronavirus, and treatment for infected cases through supportive therapy and antibiotics.
Dr. Fahid bin Muqrin Al-Qasir, Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University's College of Medicine, presented the mechanism of infection transmission and prevention through knowing the importance of transmission methods in different types of viruses and bacteria that have different ways of transmission from one person to another or from one organism to another, pointing out that the importance of knowing the method of transmission lies in determining the appropriate method of prevention and isolation for the infected, and it may be difficult to determine the transmission methods of some microbes accurately, and emerging microbes take time to know their transmission methods, ways of spreading the infection directly and indirectly, and the duration of the virus' stay outside the body.
