In the United Kingdom, twice as many black COVID-19 patients died as white COVID-19 patients. Other non-white people, like people from India and Bangladesh, were also more likely to die of COVID-19 than whites. Britain's Office of National Statistics said that the differences in money and education explained some of this difference but not all of it. They also said they did not know whether non-white patients caught COVID-19 more often or whether they caught more severe cases. Only female Chinese Britons were less likely to die of COVID-19 than white Britons.
Native Americans in the United States have shown more deaths from COVID-19 than the rest of the U.S. As of May, the Navajo Nation had 88 deaths and 2,757 cases, and the money they had been promised by the government arrived several weeks late. Only 30% of the people in the Navajo Nation have pipes with running water, which made it difficult for people to wash their hands.
Scientists from Chapman University made a plan to protect the Tsimane people in Bolivia from COVID-19 and said this plan would also work for other indigenous peoples living on their own land. The scientists said that many indigenous peoples have problems that make COVID-19 more dangerous for them, like poverty, less clean water, and other lung diseases. Hospitals may be a long distance away, and racism can affect the way doctors and nurses react. But they also sometimes have things that help, like traditions of making decisions together and the ability to grow food nearby. The scientists found people who spoke the Tsimane language as a first language and made teams to go to Tsimane towns to warn them about COVID-19. They also used radio stations. They said the best plan was for whole communities to decide to isolate. They found this worked well because the Tsimane already usually made their big decisions together as a community in special meetings and already had a tradition of quarantining new mothers. The Chapman scientists said their plan would also work for other indigenous peoples who also make decisions together, like the Tsimane.
In May 2020, police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota killed an unarmed black man called George Floyd while they were arresting him. There were weeks of protests all over the world against police brutality and racism. Experts said they were worried protesters and police could spread SARS-CoV-2 to each other. Other experts said some of the reasons that the protests were so big was because non-white people were being killed by COVID-19 more than white people were, because poor leadership in the COVID-19 crisis reminded them of poor leadership about racism, and because the lockdowns shut down workplaces and other things. This meant people had more time to protest.
African Americans are more likely to die from the virus compared to other people in the United States. 50,000 African Americans died of COVID-19 in 2020. African Americans are least likely to get vaccinated.
Romani people (Gypsies) in Europe were hard-hit by COVID-19.
In early 2020, some people began to think that the SARS-CoV-2 may have been made on purpose in a laboratory and either released by accident or on purpose like a weapon. Some Iranians thought the Americans might have made it. Chinese state media said COVID-19 came from the United States to China and not the other way around. Some Americans thought the Chinese might have made it. Some Britons thought it might have been created by accident by 5G cell phone networks.
On March 17, 2020, scientists from Columbia University and other places published a paper in "Nature Medicine" showing that SARS-CoV-2 was almost surely not made by humans in a laboratory. They did this by comparing the genomes of different viruses to each other. The scientists saw that SARS-CoV-2 did not match any of the viral backbones that already exist for virologists to use. Within a few weeks, it became one of the most cited scientific papers in history, meaning that other scientists were reading and using it.
On December 31, 2019, China alerted WHO to several cases of unusual pneumonia in Wuhan, Hubei province.
On January 20, 2020, Chinese premier Li Keqiang called for efforts to stop and control the pneumonia epidemic caused by a novel coronavirus. As of February 5, 2020, 24,588 cases have been confirmed, including in every province-level division of China. A larger number of people may have been infected, but not detected (especially mild cases). The first local transmission of the virus outside China occurred in Vietnam between family members, while the first local transmission not involving family occurred in Germany, on January 22, when a German man contracted the disease from a Chinese business visitor at a meeting. , 493 deaths have been attributed to the virus since the first confirmed death on January 9, with 990 recoveries. The first death outside China was reported in the Philippines, in a 44-year-old Chinese male on February 1. but another source reported:
"The first cases of COVID-19 outside of China were identified on January 13 in Thailand and on January 16 in Japan".
There has been testing which have showed over 6000 confirmed cases in China, some of whom are healthcare workers.
Confirmed cases have also been reported in Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Macau, Hong Kong, the United States (Everett, Washington and Chicago), Singapore, Vietnam, France and Nepal.
The World Health Organization declared that this is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern since January 30, 2020.
Bloomberg News and other business publications have reported several plant closures, travel restrictions, and imposed quarantines as a result of this outbreak.
As of February 10, 2020 there have been 40,235 confirmed cases reported of people infected by the virus in China. Also reported were 909 deaths, and 319 cases in 24 other countries, including one death, according to WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
On November 14, 2020, there were 53,853,718 global COVID-19 cases and 1,311,524 deaths with cases in 217 countries and territories.
The pandemic made it more difficult for millions of people all over the world to get enough food. People lost their jobs, so they did not have money to buy food. Farms were shut down, so there was less food made. Processing plants and food factories were shut down, so less food was made ready for people to eat.
In April, Arif Husain of the United Nations' World Food Program said that 130 million more people could go hungry, in addition to the 135 million who were already hungry before the pandemic began. He said that poorer countries would be more affected than rich countries because the way they move raw food from farms to cities and other places where people live is less organized and relies more on human beings than on automatic systems.
This hunger crisis is different from crises in other years because it happened to the whole world at the same time. That meant that people working in other countries could not help by sending money home.
All over the world, children who ate meals at school had less access to food when the schools were shut down.
Scientists from the University of Michigan said the pandemic was making it harder for people to find food. In a study published in May, they said out of of seven Americans over age 50 said they had trouble getting enough food before the pandemic, and it got worse when senior centers that provided meals were closed. Federal and state governments started programs to bring food to older people and children. There were also more food donation drives in towns.
In the United States, nursing homes had some of the highest rates of infection and death,
40% of all COVID-19 deaths in the country. Nursing homes are group homes for old people who need medical care, for disabled people who need medical care, and for people recovering from severe sickness or injury, like stroke patients.