Tuberculosis and COVID-19: an overview of two health emergencies.

Currently, a battle against the clock has been unleashed to deal with SARS-CoV-2, which to date has caused approximately nine hundred thousand deaths. Science has made significant efforts to characterize the COVID-19 virus and understand it from its origin to its transmission. Goals of the scientific community include controlling the propagation of the disease by developing hundreds of diagnostic tools and the future generation of a vaccine for this recent infection. Its counterpart, the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacillus, causes more than 1.5 million deaths a year despite being an ancient disease. Its diagnostic methods are debatable due to the scarcity of effective options. Consequently, tuberculosis has spread mainly in developing countries that are not currently able to mitigate the infection. This paper compares two infectious diseases through a global narrative review and comprehensively describes what is known to date about two global health emergencies: tuberculosis and COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]