Five years ago, in December 2019, a “pneumonia of unknown etiology” broke out in Wuhan City, China, with symptoms of the index case, or Patient Zero beginning on December 1, 2019.
Since then, 41 cases of this pneumonia were registered till February 2020, with most patients having visited a local fish and wild animal market, known colloquially as a “wet market”.
Little did the world realise that this new type of pneumonia was going to end up as a global pandemic and plague (pun intended) the world for over two years.
In a press conference held on February 12, 2020, Dr Xu Jianguo, Director of the State Key Laboratory of Infectious Disease Prevention and Control at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) categorised this strain of pneumonia as SARS‑CoV‑2 (Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2), a new type of Coronavirus, spread human-to-human.
The pneumonia caused by the Coronavirus went on to be known as COVID-19, with Patient Zero ending up being the first confirmed case.
By March 2022, COVID-19 spread to other countries, particularly Italy, with the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring the virus a global pandemic.
India saw its first case of COVID-19 in January 2020 in Kerala. In response to the spreading disease, the Government of India in March 2020 announced a total lockdown, with only essential workers allowed to step out.
In the meanwhile, India began its vaccination programme in January 2021, and cases fell to 9,000 per day in February. However, the number of cases saw a sudden surge in March, and a more destructive second wave of COVID-19 infection had begun.
During this time, India surpassed 2.5 billion active cases and became the country with the second most number of COVID-19 cases in the world. The second wave took a strain on the healthcare system of India, with frequent reports of shortage of hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and medicines.
Throughout the pandemic, India reported 533,570 deaths, according to Government figures. However, WHO estimates the actual death toll to be anywhere between 3.3 million and 6.5 million. Globally, COVID-19 claimed the lives of over seven million infected patients, according to WHO figures.
This period was marked by the closure of educational institutions like schools and colleges, workplaces, online classes and meetings, masks, social distancing, constant hand-washing and other steps to keep the viral infection at bay.
It was also marked by a spread of misinformation about the virus, vaccine hesitancy and a belligerent anti-vaccine movement in the United States of America (USA), and fear-mongering against China and people of Chinese descent.
