Coronavirus: key moments – timeline (2024)

From December 2019, when an unknown virus was found in China, to the release of vaccines for Covid-19, it has been an extraordinary year. Here’s how the momentum shifted

31 December 2019

A ‘pneumonia of unknown cause’
The world is preparing to celebrate the end of a tumultuous decade gathered together at New Year’s Eve parties. At several hospitals in Wuhan, a central Chinese industrial city, the atmosphere is far from festive. Doctors are holding an emergency symposium to discuss the treatment of more than two dozen patients presenting with a “pneumonia of unknown cause”.

A local media report – picked up by an international disease-monitoring service – says all of those who have fallen sick appear to have visited a seafood market in Wuhan. The site has been sealed. The patients are said to have high fevers, signs of pneumonia and are not responding to antibiotics. Rumours spread across the city that Sars has re-emerged.

The outbreak receives little attention abroad, though some national authorities contact the World Health Organization for more information, which the WHO requests from Beijing the next day. Studies later will suggest that Covid-19 had been spreading in Hubei province for at least six weeks, and may have already surfaced in France and Italy.

20 January 2020

‘Human-to-human transmission is certain’
A Chinese respiratory expert, Zhong Nanshan, tells state media in a late-night announcement that the novel coronavirus – already confirmed to have killed three people – has surfaced among people who never visited the Wuhan seafood market, which means the virus can spread among people. “We can say it is certain that it is a human-to-human transmission phenomenon,” Zhong says.

It is dire news, and confirms what health authorities elsewhere already suspected, after virus cases were detected in Thailand, Japan, South Korea and the US in recent days. Donald Trump received his first briefing on 18 January, but is said to have been distracted, interrupting to ask about a ban on flavoured vaping products.

Questions are already being raised about China’s handling of the outbreak. Senior officials in the country knew that human-to-human transmission was “possible” at least six days before Zhong’s announcement, according to records from a meeting obtained by the Associated Press. In public, however, they continued to say the risk that humans could give each other the virus was “low”, and allowed crowded events in Wuhan to go ahead.

15 February 2020

Silent spread
After weeks of being ravaged by the virus – recording more than 66,000 cases and 1,500 deaths – China appears to be flattening the curve. It credits drastic measures yet unseen in the west: sealing off Wuhan from the rest of the country, limiting the movement of people in dozens of other cities and rapidly testing tens of millions of its citizens.

But as the virus recedes in China, it is quietly spreading elsewhere. Europe has recorded its first death, an 80-year old Chinese man who had recently returned to Paris. A man has tested positive for the virus in Egypt, the first case on the African continent. The UK has recorded nine positive cases, but eight have recovered and are released from hospital. “This is evidence of how well prepared our NHS is to deal with the Wuhan coronavirus,” the health secretary, Matt Hanco*ck, says.

At the White House, Trump has been warned the virus will be the biggest threat of his presidency. “This is going to be the roughest thing you face,” his top national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, tells him, according to reporting by the US journalist Bob Woodward. But the US president continues to dismiss the risk in public. “By April, you know in theory when it gets a little warmer, [the virus] miraculously goes away,” Trump tells a rally.

9 March 2020

Italy’s ‘darkest hour’
Exhausted doctors, overwhelmed mortuaries and more than a thousand new cases every day: Covid-19 has plunged Italy into what the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, says is the nation’s “darkest hour”.

The virus has already torn through China and Iran, but it is the scenes from Italy and the nationwide lockdown it announces on 9 March that ram home the full scale of what the world is facing. Stock markets have their worst day since the 2008 financial crisis amid fears of another global recession.

The UK has suffered its first coronavirus death, a woman in her 70s. Downing Street says the virus is now likely to spread “in a significant way”.

16 March 2020

The week the world shut down
“We are at war,” the French president, Emmanuel Macron, tells his country in a television address announcing the strictest limits on public life since the second world war. The daily rate of cases being detected around the world has increased tenfold since the beginning of the month. Australia has asked its nationals to come home immediately. Free movement across Europe is halted.

Britain’s prime minister receives modelling from Imperial College London that shows that without decisive intervention to break the transmission of the virus, it could kill half a million people in the UK. Boris Johnson will announce a lockdown within a week.

Soon, so will the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, ordering his 1.3bn citizens to stay at home to “save India”. Migrant workers elect to return to their home villages, sparking the largest movement of people since partition in 1947. If it was not clear before, it has become so now: the world has entered a new era, confronting a disease it still barely understands, and implementing emergency policies that would have been unthinkable only weeks before.

7 April 2020

Boris Johnson is moved to intensive care
The virus has already infected high-profile figures such as Tom Hanks, Prince Charles and Sophie Trudeau, the wife of the Canadian prime minister. But the announcement that Boris Johnson has tested positive for Covid-19 creates shockwaves, underscoring a sense of national vulnerability.

When Johnson is admitted to intensive care 11 days after his diagnosis, the mood turns dire. It is suddenly unclear who is leading the UK’s response to its worst crisis in decades. The country is glued to updates on Johnson’s condition and bracing for the worst.

After a nerve-racking few days, the prime minister is moved from intensive care and begins his recovery. In a statement praising NHS staff, he suggests his survival was not always guaranteed. “I can’t thank them enough. I owe them my life,” he says.

26 June 2020

The reopening
Unprecedented measures have placed half of humanity into some form of quarantine – but they have worked. New Covid-19 cases and deaths have plunged across Europe, east Asia has broken the back of the virus, and a feared surge in African cases has failed to materialise. One by one, countries begin rolling back restrictions on businesses and travel. Airport terminals in Paris and London reopen. There are optimistic predictions that the worst of the pandemic is behind us, though vaccines could still be at least a year away.

At the same time, the virus’s economic impact is coming into view. The US unemployment rate soared in May to 14.7%, its highest rate since the Great Depression.

The UK’s fall in GDP is the largest since record-keeping started. In developing countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, 15 years of gains against poverty have been wiped out in months.

16 July 2020

US cases surge
After a slow start, including the distribution of faulty testing kits, stay-at-home orders in New York and other states have flattened the rate of new infections by May. But with the economic toll growing, Donald Trump starts urging the “liberation” of locked-down states.

The coronavirus is taking on partisan dimensions, with Democratic voters far more likely to believe the virus is serious, and Republican-run states quicker to lift stay-at home orders and limits on public gatherings.

By July, cases have declined in Europe, the UK, Canada and Australia.

2 August 2020

Summer reprieve
The rate of new infections being detected globally has plateaued, albeit at more than 200,000 cases a day. Spain, Germany, Italy and the UK are detecting fewer than 50 positive cases per 100,000 people, their lowest rates since the beginning of the outbreak.

Borders across Europe have reopened and people are on the move, visiting Greek islands, French vineyards and Italian countryside hamlets. National Geographic calls it the “summer of road trips”.

Restaurants in the UK return to life, helped by chancellor Rishi Sunak’s “eat out to help out” scheme, which subsidises food and drink for three days a week throughout August. The British economy rebounds by more than 15% over the summer months; at times, sitting in pub gardens or dining outdoors, life even feels normal.

Some public health experts see worrying signs. The virus is still out there, they warn. Young people are now making up a large proportion of new cases, many becoming infected at the pubs and cafes where they work. Eventually, they will come into contact with older relatives.

22 September 2020

The virus roars back
“We have a very serious situation unfolding before us,” Hans Kluge, the WHO’s Europe director warns in a media briefing during the week. After a short respite over summer, the virus returns to Europe with shocking speed. Weekly cases on the continent have soared higher than at the first peak of the disease in March.

Cooler weather, pushing people indoors where the virus spreads more easily, is inflating caseloads across the northern hemisphere – and winter is still months away.

Boris Johnson tells parliament that Covid-19 hospital admissions have doubled in England over the past fortnight and the country is at a “perilous turning point”. But he resists ordering the national lockdown that some health experts are pushing for, and which rebels in his cabinet bitterly oppose.

In India, the first wave never ebbed, and its outbreak is now the world’s fastest. The country has gained 5m new cases in two months, though the death rate among its young population is relatively low. For many in the country of 1.3bn people, it is the worst recession on record that is biting harder than Covid-19.

2 October 2020

Trump tests positive
In the middle of the night in the US, the tweet appears: “Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for Covid-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately.” After criticising masks, repeatedly likening Covid-19 to flu, and continuing to hold election rallies (that were linked led to an estimated to 30,000 new cases and 700 deaths), Donald Trump contracts the virus in a development that threatens to upend the US presidential race.

Trump’s handling of his own sickness over the next days appears to mirror his administration’s uneven approach to the pandemic. After the US president is moved to hospital, his doctor sows confusion in a media briefing by claiming his symptoms are mild. He is contradicted immediately afterwards by the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who tells journalists Trump’s condition is “very concerning” and the path to recovery is not yet clear.

Defying guidelines to isolate, Trump insists on thanking crowds of supporters outside his hospital by driving past in his presidential vehicle. As his condition improves over the next days – and though he remains infectious – Trump signals his return to the White House on 6 October with another tweet: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life,” he says.

By that stage, the disease has killed 209,000 Americans.

9 November 2020

A ‘very dark winter’
England has returned to a stringent lockdown. France has closed bars and restaurants and requires citizens to seek permission to leave their homes. Nearly a third of Spain’s intensive-care capacity is being used to treat Covid-19 patients. A key question – whether Covid-19 is a seasonal virus that worsens in cooler months – has been decisively answered, and Europe is in the grip of a second wave with caseloads exceeding those of the spring.

Even Sweden, where less rigorous restrictions have served as a model for quarantine critics, has experienced a surge in cases and introduces curfews on bars and restaurants, while Stockholm bans people from visiting elderly relatives at nursing homes.

Daily US cases exceed 130,000 a day, and will touch 200,000 before the end of the month. Joe Biden, the president-elect, warns Americans they face a “very dark winter”.

23 November 2020

Here come the vaccines
AstraZeneca and Oxford University report their vaccine candidate has at least 61% efficacy, building on the results from Pfizer and Moderna announced over the previous fortnight, which found their formulations halted symptoms in up to 95% of trial participants.

The results transform the future shape of the pandemic, with hopes that vaccines could be rolled out on a mass scale in the UK, Europe and the US by the first quarter of 2021. After the Pfizer jab is quickly approved in the UK, on Tuesday 8 December, Margaret Keenan, 90, becomes the first person in the world to be given an approved vaccine at her local hospital in Coventry.

Supply constraints and massive pre-purchasing by wealthy countries make it unclear when developing and middle-income countries receive thevaccine, with warnings that some may be waiting until 2023 to receive enough to induce herd immunity.

Still, with economies reeling from another lockdown, new US cases surging past 200,000 a day and the coldest months of the year still ahead for the northern hemisphere, there is suddenly a pathway out of the crisis – highly effective vaccines developed in record time. “The light at the end of this long, dark tunnel is growing brighter,” the WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, tells a media conference.

* Though North Korea and Turkmenistan have both officially recorded zero cases, observers believe the pandemic has reached both nations.
Graphics sources: The Lancet; WHO; NIH; SCMP; Johns Hopkins

This article was archived on 27 October 2021. Some elements may be out of date.