In 2020, this was the only story on Earth. Schools, borders, whole countries: shut.
Officially, 7.1 million people died of COVID-19. The real number is probably closer to 27 million: nearly four times as many.
The biggest crisis of our generation. So let's go back to where it started: one city.
Estimate from excess deaths: The Economist, 2024.
Wuhan. Eleven million people, right in the middle of China.
December 2019: doctors start seeing a pneumonia they can't explain. One patient. Then a cluster. Then another.
On December 30th, an eye doctor named Li Wenliang writes to his old medical-school classmates. Seven cases of SARS, he says, from the seafood market. Tell your families.
Four days later, the police make him sign a letter: he has been publishing untrue statements. He is one of eight doctors punished for spreading rumours.
The other seven doctors are not identified; they are drawn here as illustrations.
Meanwhile, the cases double. And double again. About every seven and a half days.
And the timing could not be worse. It's almost Chinese New Year, the biggest yearly migration on Earth, and Wuhan sits in the middle of the rail network.
At two in the morning on January 23rd, the city is told: at ten o'clock, everything stops. Before the gates close, about 300,000 people leave by train alone.
Wuhan locks down, then all of Hubei: about 57 million people. But the virus has already left.
By the end of February it is on every continent but one.
Li Wenliang caught it from a patient. He died on February 7th. He was thirty-four.
Italy acted early: on January 31st, when its first two cases were found, it stopped every flight from China. It wasn't enough.
On February 21st a cluster appears in Codogno, a small town in Lombardy. Eleven towns are sealed off. Then all of Lombardy. On March 9th, the whole country: sixty million people, the first nation on Earth to lock itself down.
Two days later, the World Health Organization uses the word:
“We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.”
By then the virus has reached more than a hundred countries.
In Bergamo, the dead come faster than the city can bury them. Army trucks carry the coffins to other cities. On March 19th, Italy passes China: more deaths than any other country.
Across the Atlantic, New York confirms its first case on March 1st. But the virus had been there for weeks, and when scientists read its genes, most of it hadn't come from Asia at all. It came from Europe.
By the end of March the United States has more confirmed cases than any other country. Country after country tells its people to stay home.
By early April, more than half of humanity has been told to stay home.
Schools close: by September more than a billion students have been kept out of class. Shelves empty out. Streets go quiet.
In the United States alone, more than forty million jobs are gone. Worldwide, people earn $3.5 trillion less from their work in nine months: the worst recession since the Great Depression.
With the world on pause, the sky changes. Over China, nitrogen dioxide falls by half.
Everyone waits for it to pass. But this is only a pause.
The virus comes back. Again, and again. In December 2020 scientists in England report a faster variant, later named Alpha, and the winter wave becomes the deadliest yet.
That same month, vaccines arrive. It is not a fair race: by April 2021, one in four people in rich countries has had a dose. In poorer countries, one in five hundred.
Then India: a new variant, Delta, and in April 2021 a second wave that buckles the country's hospitals.
On November 24th, South Africa detects Omicron, more infectious still. Within two months the world reports nearly three and a half million cases in a day.
Officially, the pandemic killed 7.1 million people. But many deaths were never counted.
Comparing all deaths with what normal years would bring, the estimate is 18 to 35 million. Most likely, around 27 million.
And it did not strike evenly. For a ten-year-old, the risk of dying from an infection was about 2 in 100,000. For an eighty-five-year-old, 15 in 100: seven and a half thousand times higher.
The vaccines, in their first year alone, prevented an estimated 14 to 20 million deaths.
On May 5th, 2023, the WHO declared the emergency over. Many people heard: the pandemic is over. The WHO did not say that.
By that autumn, many countries had stopped counting cases at all. The map went quiet.
One question is still open: where did it come from?
Nature: a bat virus jumps to another animal, then to people, perhaps at the market where early cases clustered. Many scientists, and the WHO's 2021 study, lean this way.
Or a laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which studied bat coronaviruses. The FBI and the US Energy Department lean this way.
There is no proof either way. The early patient lists, swabs and blood samples were never fully shared, and in 2021 China refused the second phase of the WHO's inquiry.
The origin is still an open question. The count is not: some twenty-seven million lives.