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The CDC Museum maintains a timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic, from its known
origins onward. The opening entries are worth reading as a sequence, because
the intervals between them are short.
| Date | |
|---|---|
| 12 December 2019 | A cluster of patients in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China begin experiencing symptoms of an atypical pneumonia-like illness that does not respond well to standard treatments |
| 31 December 2019 | The WHO Country Office in China is informed of several cases of pneumonia of unknown cause, with shortness of breath and fever. All initial cases seem connected to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market |
| 1 January 2020 | The market is closed, amid worries in China of a reprise of the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak |
| 2 January 2020 | The WHO activates its Incident Management Support Team across all three organisational levels — Country Office, Regional Office and Headquarters |
What those three weeks contain
Nineteen days between the first patients falling ill and the WHO being
informed. Two days after that, an international response structure is running.
The phrase doing the most work in the first entry is **"does not respond well
to standard treatments."** That is what turns a cluster of pneumonia — an
ordinary thing in December — into something a clinician escalates. Pneumonia
that will not behave is the signal.
And the 1 January entry records what people at the time actually feared: not a
novel global pandemic, but SARS again. The frame of reference for the first
weeks of COVID-19 was an outbreak from seventeen years earlier that had been
contained.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC Museum.
Licenza: CC0 1.0 (pubblico dominio) · Tratto da www.cdc.gov
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