COVID-19 pandemic

The **COVID-19 pandemic**, also called the **coronavirus pandemic**, was a world-wide pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). It is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

The disease was first found in Wuhan, Hubei, China, in December 2019. On 31 December, Chinese health authorities told the World Health Organization (WHO) about a group of viral pneumonia cases of unknown cause,The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses gave the virus its name. As of September 30 2024, about  cases of COVID-19 have been reported, and about  people have died of COVID-19.

The virus mostly spreads when people are close to each other, which is why social distancing is used. Common symptoms include fever, cough, and trouble breathing. As of January 2021, a number of vaccines for COVID-19 have been developed, but only a few have been found safe to use. The first vaccine to be approved was created by Pfizer and BioNTech, followed by the Oxford / AstraZeneca  vaccine. Vaccine  was started in many countries in Europe, North America, South America and Asia. The United Kingdom was the first western country to begin to give out a COVID-19 vaccine.  The vaccine was given out to all people in the country for free. No antiviral medicine for COVID-19 is available. Doctors usually give patients supportive therapy instead such as giving fluids, food, oxygen, pain relief and other treatments designed to help patients deal with the symptoms. People can avoid spreading the virus by regularly washing their hands, covering their mouth when coughing, maintaining distance from other people, staying away from crowds, wearing medical or cloth face coverings, and being alone for people who think they are infected, also known as quarantining. A 55-year-old person from Hubei province was the first human to contract the virus on November 17, 2019. A 61-year-old man who was a regular customer at the market was the first person to die from the virus on January 11, 2020. The exact origin of the virus is still unknown since the market in Wuhan sold a variety of live wild animals in cages. Chinese tourists have spread the virus by traveling to other countries and made it a worldwide pandemic.

Racism and xenophobia against Chinese people and Asians increased during the pandemic.

In November 2020, two companies, Pfizer and Moderna, said they had finished making COVID-19 vaccines. Two mRNA vaccines, one by Pfizer and one by Moderna, have been tested. Both were over 90% effective. Countries began planning to give the vaccine to many people. 25 other vaccines have been approved by at least one country, and many others are being developed.

The United States has had the most deaths from the virus. Over 1 million Americans have died from the virus. and an investigation was launched in early January 2020.

On 9 June 2020, a Harvard University study suggested that COVID-19 may have been spreading in China as early as August 2019, based on hospital car park usage and web search trends.

### Cases
Cases means the number of people who have been tested for COVID-19 and have tested positive. These cases are according to Johns Hopkins University.

### Deaths
 in April 2020]]

Almost all people who get COVID-19 recover. For those who do not, the time between the start of symptoms and death usually ranges from6 to 41 days, but most of the time about 14 days. This data is recorded by the WHO.

## Signs & Symptoms
According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID-19 makes people feel sick in different ways, but it usually affects the lungs. People usually cough and have difficulty breathing. They often also have a fever, chills, headache, pain in their muscles, or trouble tasting or smelling things, which can often be confused with the flu virus.

According to an April 2020 study by the American Gastroenterological Association, COVID-19 can make sick people vomit or have diarrhea, but this is rare. They said about 7.7% of COVID-19 patients vomited, about 7.8% had diarrhea and about 3.6% had pain in their stomachs.

## Treatment
Since there is no exact cure for Covid-19, treatment has focused on treating the symptoms of the disease such as giving oxygen and using machines to aid breathing, giving pain killers to relieve pain, supportive treatment such as giving fluids, food and drugs to combat other symptoms and diseases that affect the person at the same time. Doctors have tried different medicines to see if they help in treatment such as colchicine, systemic corticosteroids (particularly dexamethasone), interleukin-6 receptor antagonists (such as tocilizumab), and Janus kinase inhibitors (such as baricitinib) have been seen to reduce  and have other benefits in patients with severe covid-19, such as reducing the severity of the disease and reducing the length of hospital stay.

## Data

File:COVID-19 Outbreak World Map.svg|Map of the COVID-19 outbreak 

## Name
In February 2020, the WHO announced a name for the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2: COVID-19. It replaced the name "2019-nCoV." "Covi" is for "coronavirus," "D" for "disease," and "19" for the year 2019 – the year it was first detected. They said they did not want the name to have any person, place, or animal in it because people might blame the disease on that place, person, or animal. For example, it did not use the word "Wuhan." They also wanted the name to be easy to say out loud.

## Mortality rate of COVID-19
According to an article in Market Watch dated on February 27, 2020, the overall case mortality rate in China was 2.3%. However, these results might be severely different between different age groups and between men and women. People over the age of 70 experienced a rate of mortality 4-5 times that of the average. Men were more likely to die than women (2.8% versus 1.7% for women) possibly due to lifestyle, such as it being more possible in men to drink and smoke, making the risk of having a respiratory illness more possible, and thus more vulnerable. These numbers were the conclusion of a study by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention using 72,314 COVID-19 cases in mainland China as of Feb. 11. At that point this was the largest sample of cases for such a study.

On March 5, 2020, the WHO released the case fatality rate.

## Race and racism
COVID-19 did not affect everyone in each country the same way. As of May 2020, APM Research Lab said the death rate among black Americans was 2.4 times as high as for white Americans and 2.2 times as high as for Latino and Asian Americans. In July 2020, *The New York Times* printed data from the Centers for Disease Control showing that black and Latino Americans were three times as likely to become sick and twice as likely to die as white Americans. This was not only in large cities but also in rural areas. This was not only for old people but for people in all age groups. Native Americans were also more likely than whites to become sick and die. Asian Americans were 1.3 times as likely as whites to become sick.

Camara Jones, an epidemiologist who once worked for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this was socioeconomic and not because of any natural difference in black and white people's bodies. In the United States, black citizens are more likely to work jobs where they serve the public directly and to ride on public transport rather than take their own cars to work. This makes them more likely to be infected than people who work in private offices or from home. Sharrelle Barber, an epidemiologist and biostatistician from Drexel University, also said black Americans can live in crowded neighborhoods where social distancing is harder to do and healthy food harder to find. Both Barber and Jones blamed the long history of racism in the United States for these things. Three senators, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren said the federal government should start recording the race of COVID-19 patients so scientists could study this problem.

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.

### Indigenous peoples
Native Americans in the United States have shown more deaths from COVID-19 than the rest of the U.S.

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 Waswanipi Cree in Canada, the Mapoon people in Australia, and many groups in South America already tried plans like these on their own.

### George Floyd protests
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
African Americans are more likely to catch the virus compared to their white counterparts in the United States, and are also more likely to die from it. 50,000 African Americans died of COVID-19 in 2020. African Americans are the least likely to get vaccinated against the disease.

### Hispanics
Latinos have been at a higher risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19 in the United States. There are many reasons why Latinos have a higher risk of getting very sick or going to the hospital because of COVID-19. One reason is that they often have health problems like diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. They are also more likely to have jobs where they have to be around other people, like in healthcare, grocery stores, and farming. Many Latinos live in crowded places with many people, like big families or busy neighborhoods. This makes it hard to stay far away from others and can make the virus spread more easily. Some Latinos might not speak English well, which can make it hard to get healthcare or understand how to stay healthy. Finally, many Latinos don't have health insurance or don't have enough of it. All of these things are connected and can make it more likely for Latinos to get very sick from COVID-19.

## Conspiracy theories
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.

There were also several conspiracy theories circulating about Bill Gates and his alleged involvement with the COVID-19 pandemic. Theories wrongfully linking Gates to the coronavirus were mentioned 1.2 million times on television or social media between February and April 2020. One of the most prominent ones was that Bill Gates somehow created or engineered the virus as part of a plan to depopulate the world. There is no evidence to support this claim, and it has been debunked by numerous experts in the field and fact checking organizations including the National Institutes of Health and Reuters. Some conspiracy theorists allege that Bill Gates is using the pandemic to profit from the development and distribution of vaccines and other medical treatments. While Gates has been heavily involved in funding research on vaccines and treatments for COVID-19, he has not personally profited from this work. In fact, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated over $2 billion to COVID-19 efforts since the start of the pandemic. 

One of the impacts of these conspiracy theories is that they have generated fear and suspicion towards COVID-19 vaccines. Bill Gates commented on the impact of these theories, saying: "During the pandemic, there were tens of millions of messages that I intentionally caused it, or I'm tracking people. It's true I'm involved with vaccines, but I'm involved with vaccines to save lives."

## Graphs

File:Illustration of SARS-COV-2 Case Fatality Rate 200228 01-1.png|alt=3D Medical Animation Still Shot graph showing Case Fatality rates by age group from SARS-COV-2 in China.|Case fatality rates by age group in China. Data through 11 February 2020.
File:Epidemic curve of daily new COVID-19 cases by continent.svg|Epidemic curve of daily new cases of COVID-19 (7 day rolling average) by continent
File:Covid-19 new cases in top 5 countries and the world.png|Semi-log plot of weekly new cases of COVID-19 in the world and top five current countries (mean with deaths)
File:Covid-19 total cases per 100 000 population from selected countries.png|COVID-19 total cases per 100,000 population from selected countries
File:COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 population.png|COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 population from selected countries

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 were confirmed, including in every province-level division of China. 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 were 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".

Testing showed over 6000 confirmed cases in China, some of whom are healthcare workers.

Confirmed cases were reported in Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Macau, Hong Kong, the United States (Everett, Washington and Chicago), 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. Many small businesses, even big ones, have gone bankrupt because of the pandemic.

As of February 10, 2020, there were 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.

### China 
 event]]
* The first cases of COVID-19 were detected in Wuhan, Hubei, Mainland China in December 2019.
* On Feb. 4, 2020, the Seattle Times reported that Around 2020 Chinese new year authorities closed down travel from China to Macau. As a result, visits fell eighty percent.
* Feb 6, 2020, the COVID-19 whistleblower, Li Wenliang, dies of the disease.
* On February 6, 2020, according to Chinese authorities, a man from the United States who tested positive for the virus died.
* On February 25, 2020, the Asian Scientist Magazine reported *Chinese Scientists Sequence Genome Of COVID-19* 
* According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention, China had the largest number of confirmed cases and deaths on March 1, 2020.
* On March 3, 2020, Science (journal) reported:
** China built two new hospitals in one week just for patients of COVID-19
** The article praised the way China has handled this crisis but said "draconian" measures were used to achieve success.
* On March 6, 2020, CNN reported that a hotel used as a COVID-19 quarantine center collapsed. Seventy people were trapped in a collapsed Quanzhou hotel.
* The Chinese economy was greatly affected by the virus, and many factories shut down during the spike of cases in China during the early months of the pandemic.
* As of October 30, 2020, the number of cases of the virus in China were generally going down, with only 771 new cases being reported in the month of October.

### United States 
* The first case of COVID-19 in the United States was detected in a man from the state of Washington on January 21, 2020.
* On February 27, 2020, US President Donald Trump appointed Vice President Mike Pence to lead the US response to COVID-19.
* On February 29, 2020, the first death in the US was reported from the state of Washington.
* On March 3, 2020 CBS reported 15 states with confirmed cases.
* Movements such as elbow bumps began replacing handshakes , as handshakes spread the virus and bacteria more.
* On March 6, 2020, the CDC announced that one million test kits would be distributed.
* On March 9, 2020, the US stock market was approaching bear territory.
* On March 9, 2020, there were also scattered reports that some were quarantined while their household members were not.
* On March 10, 2020, the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, said that it is was not known how many Americans tested positive for the virus. This was because many of the test kits went out to private companies.
* On March 10, 2020, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, announced that the city of New Rochelle was the largest cluster of COVID-19 cases in the state. Among other things done to contain the virus in New Rochelle, the National Guard was sent to the city to hand out food and disinfect buildings.
* On March 26, the United States surpass Italy and China's cases, becoming the epicenter for a while.
* On April 3, 2020, the CDC first recommended the use of cloth face coverings by the general public to reduce the spread of the virus in places such as grocery stores and pharmacies.
* On April 11, the U.S. became the most death in the world.
* On July 22, 2020, the United States surpassed 1,000 daily COVID-19 deaths for a second time.
* On September 22, 2020, the United States reached 200,000 deaths from the virus.
* Between September to October, there was a COVID-19 outbreak at the White House, causing many officials to be diagnosed with the infection, including President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump.
* In December 2020, California surpassed over 30,000 new cases in a day.
* On December 11, 2020, the Food and Drug Administration said doctors could give people the Pfizer vaccine.
* California became the first state to surpass 2 million cases in December 2020.

#### Economic effects of COVID-19 in the United States 
* On March 6, President Trump signed a $8.3 billion emergency spending package to fight the COVID outbreak.
* On March 5, 2020, it was announced that medical costs for Washington state residents asking to be tested would be waived until May. (People have to pay for their own health care in the United States. See: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act).
* On March 9, 2020, President Trump proposed, among other measures, a payroll tax cut to help the US economy.

### Italy 
* On February 27, 2020, according to the EU Observer, a dozen towns in the northern regions of Lombardy and Veneto were under lockdown, with around 50,000 citizens not allowed to leave, and over 200 reported cases of COVID n Italy.
* On March 4, 2020, according to the Guardian, the Italian government has ordered the closing of all of Italy's schools and universities until 15 March 2020
* On March 5, 2020, the Guardian reported: "Italian educational institutions close as Covid-19 deaths pass 100"
* On March 8, 2020, Al Jazeera reported that after a daily infection rate of 1,247 cases, Lombardy together with ten other areas were sealed off to try to quarantine 16 million people. The cities of Milan and Venice were in the quarantined area.
* On March 10, 2020, it was reported that Italy was under quarantine.
* On October 5, 2020, Italy imposed a new lockdown and set of restrictions after previously relaxing them. This was due to a second wave of cases that was even worse than the one in spring.

### Iran 
* On 28 February 2020, the BBC reported COVID-19 deaths in Iran were at least 210.
* March 3, 2020, multiple Iranian government officials including deputy health minister Iraj Harirchi and vice president of women and family affairs Masoumeh Ebtekar, who served as a spokesperson during the Iran hostage crisis, had contracted COVID-19.

### Canada 
* The first case of COVID-19 in Canada was detected in a man from Toronto on January 25, 2020.
* On March 12, 2020, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, the wife of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, tested positive for coronavirus. The Prime Minister and his wife isolated for 14 days.
* On April 6, 2020, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, Theresa Tam, said that people should use simple cloth facemasks to help slow the spread of the virus.

### South Africa 
* The new coronavirus strain, called the 501.V2 Variant, was first discovered in South African province Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape. It spreads more rapidly.

### Australia
* First case reported on 25 January 2020.
* See COVID-19 pandemic in Australia

### New Zealand
* The first case of COVID-19 in New Zealand was detected in late February 2020 in a person in their 60s.
* Between August 25, 2021, and August 31, 2021, the whole of New Zealand had been temporarily increased to its maximum lockdown level, Level 4, due to the delta variant. Most of the cases during August 2021 were originated from New South Wales. As of September 6, 2021, all of New Zealand has dropped to Level 2, while Auckland remains at Level 4.

### Africa
* In late February 2020, Nigeria had it's first case in Sub-Saharan Africa which negatively affected Nigeria's economy, education, religion and social relationships.
* In November 2020, Africa surpassed 2 million cases.

## Food and hunger
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. Federal and state governments started programs to bring food to older people and children. There were also more food donation drives in towns.

## Elderly
In the United States, nursing homes had some of the highest rates of infection and death, with 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.

Many people who live in nursing homes pay through the government program Medicaid, which pays less than Medicare or regular insurance companies. In June, many American nursing homes were caught throwing their regular patients out so they could make room for COVID-19 patients who could pay them more. Because nursing homes had stopped allowing visitors, it took longer for them to get caught. United States law requires nursing homes to warn patients 30 days before kicking them out, but the nursing homes did not do this.

Some of the nursing homes took the COVID-19 patients because state governments asked them to and they say they sent their elderly residents away because they were worried, they would catch COVID-19 from the sick patients.

## Environment
Because so many governments told people to stay at home, there was less air pollution than usual for that time of year. Pollution in New York fell by 50% and the use of coal in China fell by 40%. The European Space Agency showed pictures taken from a satellite of China's pollution disappearing during quarantine and coming back when everyone went back to work.

The pandemic and shutdowns made people use less electricity. In the United States, people got less of their electricity from coal power but kept using gas and renewable power like wind and solar power. This was because coal plants are more expensive to run, so power companies used them less.

Pollution from before the pandemic also affected what happened after people became sick. Scientists saw that more people died from COVID-19 in places with large amounts of air pollution. One team of scientists from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg looked at air pollution information from satellites and statistics on COVID-19 deaths in Italy, France, Germany and Spain and saw that places with large amounts of nitrogen dioxide pollution had more people die from COVID-19. Nitrogen dioxide can damage the lungs.

The shutdowns and social distancing also affected animals. Human beings started staying at home about the same time in the spring when sea turtles like to come on land to lay their eggs. Turtle scientists in the United States and Thailand both reported more nests than usual on seashores in Florida and Phuket. They say it is because people are not coming to the beach or bringing their dogs to the beach and because there are fewer boats in the water nearby. Scientists also say they see more dugong and dolphins. With fewer cars driving down roads, salamanders, frogs, and other amphibians were able to cross them for their spring migration. According to citizen scientists from Big Night Maine, a group that watches amphibians, four amphibians made it across the roads alive for every one amphibian killed by cars. Most years, it is only two to one.

Not all ocean mammals did well. According to marine biologists in Florida, manatee deaths in April and May were 20% higher than in 2019. They say this was because many people decided to go boating because other things to do were closed.

## Stopping the next pandemic
Researchers from the San Diego Zoo Global had the idea for a system that people could use to find dangerous germs before they become pandemics or even before they jump from other animals to humans. They said it was important to watch the wildlife trade, like in the Wuhan wet market. The scientists said that over the past eleven years it has gotten easier and easier to sequence viral genomes, and it does not have to be done by a large lab or by a government anymore. The scientists said it would be better to spread the work out among more people.

## List of terms used in COVID-19 pages 
* Long COVID is the set of symptoms that stay for a long time after getting COVID-19
* SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19
* 2019-nCoV is the old name for *SARS-CoV-2*
* Coronavirus disease 2019 is the complete name for COVID-19
* Community spread is the spread of the disease without a known travel connection
* Clusters are groups of COVID-19 cases in which many people in the same area became infected with COVID-19

## References

## Other websites
* WHO site for COVID-19
* CDC site for COVID-19
* WHO questions on COVID-19
* Novel Coronavirus Map Infographics, Channel News Asia
* Johns Hopkins University coronavirus statistics (until March 10, 2023)