COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic is an ongoing global pandemic of the coronavirus disease. Originating in China in December 2019, lockdowns of Wuhan and other cities in the country failed to stop the virus and it spread around the world, becoming one of the deadliest pandemics in history.
== Impact on Emmerdale ==
The pandemic, and measures taken to limit the spread of the virus as much as possible, has led to ongoing TV programmes such as Emmerdale being severely impacted. On 18th March 2020, ITV announced they would be reducing the number of episodes of the show broadcast a week, from six to five. They also said they would be "scaling back" location shooting and filming with reduced numbers of cast and crew.
However, with the worldwide situation escalating, it soon became clear this would not be enough. On 22nd March, filming of Emmerdale was suspended, along with several other ITV programmes - just a day later, the UK's Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the country was to go into lockdown with immediate effect. In response to this, the rate of episodes per week was quickly cut again, from five to three in order to make the supply of episodes already in the can last as long as possible. The first episode to be affected by the new schedule was Episode 8771 (1st April 2020), which originally would have been broadcast on the previous day.
Filming resumed in May 2020 after a two-month hiatus, albeit with the practice of social distancing across all scenes - all interactions between characters had to be done at a two-metre distance, even when they were playing characters who shared residences. A notable exception was the characters of Eric Pollard and Brenda Walker, as the actors Christopher Chittell and Lesley Dunlop are a married couple. Occasional exceptions were also made to allow characters to interact close together when it's important to the scene, by virtue of them "bubbling up" beforehand - self-isolating together and regularly being tested for the virus. A notable example is the scene in Episode 9094 (8th July 2021) in which Leanna Cavanagh (played by Mimi Slinger) was fatally pushed off a bridge by Meena Jutla (Paige Sandhu).
The first episodes to be filmed upon resumption were a series of six special two-hander episodes (except one, which featured three characters) which aired the following month; these involved the characters Lydia and Sam Dingle (8800a, 8th June 2020), Cain and Aaron Dingle (8800b, 10th June 2020), Mandy Dingle and Vinny (8800d, 15th June 2020), Jimmy and Nicola King (8800c, 17th June 2020), Chas Dingle and Paddy Kirk (8800e, 22nd June 2020) and Marlon Dingle and Ellis and Al Chapman (8800f, 24th June 2020). For the duration of these episodes being aired, the number of weekly episodes was temporarily reduced further, from three to two.
From Episode 8801 (29th June 2020), Emmerdale returned to the storylines that had been paused when filming was suspended. Between this and Episode 8813 (27th July 2020), episodes featured a mix of scenes filmed pre and post-lockdown; from Episode 8814 (29th July 2020), all scenes were filmed after production resumed.