COVID-19 history - explained briefly

You and I have been in this pandemic for 2 years! You probably don’t even remember how life was before Covid, the masks, the quarantines, the tests and the vaccines. Some unfortunate kids were born during this pandemic, and don’t even know what “normal life” is.

It has been so long, that to remember all the scary moments of the Covid waves is an incredible challenge, so here is the global full history or Corona Virus Disease.

The first ever confirmed case of covid was a 55-year-old person from Hubei a province in China, on November 17, 2019. It looks like he was the first ever person to get Covid, but he probably was only the first detected.

As you can see from the graphs above that describe the worldwide cases and deaths since the start of the pandemic, there have been 3 main waves, and we are entering the 4th wave.

In the first 3 waves there were just above 5 million cases, but in this fourth wave we already reached the 10 million mark, which looks very concerning.

Luckily even if the cases are going up the deaths are significantly decreasing. The peaks of deaths happened in January and March of 2021.

Variants:

There have been many variants detected, but up to now only 4 are classified as Variants of Concern (VOC) by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Up to now the variants of concern are 4:

Beta, firstly detected in South Africa, Gamma firstly detected in Brazil, Delta firstly detected in India and the most common now, Omicron, currently the new variant firstly detected in South Africa.

We all hope that this pandemic will soon come to an end, and that we will get back to normal life.