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We’re well into summer here in the Northern Hemisphere. For a parent of two young children, that means ice creams, water fountains, picnics, and—inevitably—coughs and colds. My eldest told me she was feeling poorly this morning, and the youngest crawled into my bed to cough in my face.
It’s not just kids, of course. My colleague has just come down with covid-19. The onset of symptoms was rapid, and she described it as “like being hit by a freight train.” “How very retro of you,” another colleague commented. Another replied: “This is still a thing?”
As a health reporter who has been covering covid since the early days, I am still asked this question on a fairly regular basis. So this week let’s take a look at exactly where we stand with covid.
It’s worth pointing out that there are still some big, unanswered questions when it comes to covid-19. For a start, we still don’t really know where this particular coronavirus came from. Most scientists believe it must have jumped from an animal host to humans at a market in Wuhan, China. But some maintain that it could have leaked from a lab. My colleague Antonio Regalado has explored the question in his five-part podcast series, Curious Coincidence.
What we do know is that covid-19 spread all around the world in 2020. On January 9 of that year, Chinese authorities determined that a mysterious cluster of pneumonia-like illnesses was caused by a novel coronavirus. The first death was reported days later. Since then, almost 7 million more deaths have been confirmed. The true figure is thought to be higher.
Lockdowns and the use of face masks helped slow the spread of the disease. But even “zero-covid” policies that aimed to keep the virus out of entire countries couldn’t stem the spread. To date, there have been over 767 million confirmed cases.
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