A Timeline of Covid-19

All the news not fit to print
Email | Back to History | Back to the world news | Home | Support this website

TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.

Nov 17, 2019: The first case of covid-19 is detected in Hubei province, according to an article in the March 13 South China Morning Post by Josephine Ma, citing an unpublished China government report

Dec 1, 2019: A worker of a wildlife market in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, is the first recorded case of a new kind of pneumonia (reported only on Dec 16)

Dec 16, 2019: A patient at Wuhan Central Hospital is diagnosed with an unknown coronavirus, according to an article by Ai Fen, director of the emergency at Wuhan Central hospital, in China's Renwu/People magazine (the interview is later censored)

Dec 27, 2019: Zhang Jixian, a doctor from Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, informs Wuhan health officials that a new coronavirus is causing the new kind of pneumonia (more than 180 people have been infected)

Dec 30, 2019: Ai Fen tells other doctors about a new SARS-like virus but she is reprimanded by the hospital and forbidden to post any more information; Wenliang Li, one of the doctors that has received the information, posts to a WeChat group of his former schoolmates of a SARS-like infection and his post is shared widely on WeChat

Dec 31, 2019: Wuhan health officials confirm 27 cases of the unknown disease and inform the World Health Organization that a new coronavirus is causing a cluster of pneumonia in the city

Dec 31, 2019: There are already 104 cases in Hubei province (according to a February 17 report by China's CDC)

Dec 31, 2019: Taiwan begins inspecting all passengers coming from Wuhan

Jan 1, 2020: Wuhan authorities close the wildlife market that seems related to the virus' spread given that the SARS outbreak in 2002 started at a similar market in Guangdong province

Jan 1, 2020: Wuhan's Public Security Bureau intimidates the eight doctors who had posted about the new illness on WeChat while the Hubei Provincial Health Commission orders city labs to stop testing samples and to destroy existing samples

Jan 3, 2020: Wuhan police summons Wenliang Li and reprimands him for "making false comments on the Internet"

Jan 3, 2020: Zhang Yongzhen at Fudan University in Shanghai analyzes a sample from Wuhan and realizes that it is 89.11% similar to the SARS virus

Jan 5: The World Health Organization issues a worldwide warning titled "Pneumonia of unknown cause"

Jan 5: Fudan University in Shanghai announces that the Wuhan cluster is associated with a novel coronavirus and that it has sequenced the entire genome

Jan 5: The head of China's CDC informs Trump's CDC director Robert Redfield of the gravity of the new virus (this will emerge only later)

Jan 6: The New York Times publishes an article about a pneumonia-like illness in Wuhan

Jan 8: The World Health Organization warns that the 50 pneumonia cases in Wuhan may be caused by a new deadly virus related to SARS and MERS

Jan 9: The Wuhan City Health Commission declares that "there is no clear evidence the virus can spread among humans" (later this will be proven wrong)

Jan 10: Chinese scientists of Fudan University in Shanghai publish the new virus' genetic sequence on Virological.org showing that the genome contains 29,811 RNA bases representing instructions for 25-29 proteins (original post)

Jan 10: In the first ten days of January there are 653 cases and 102 deaths (according to a February 17 report by China's CDC)

Jan 11: A Communist Party meeting is held in Wuhan as scheduled while the Wuhan Health Commission insists that there are only 41 confirmed cases

Jan 11: Wuhan (and therefore the world) records the first death of covid-19

Jan 12: There are no covid-19 cases outside the province of Hubei (World Health Organization)

Jan 13: The first covid-19 case is reported outside China (a Chinese woman from Wuhan in Thailand)

Jan 13: North Korea places all citizens returning from China under "medical supervision" (a United Nations resolution forced China to repatriate all North Korean laborers)

Jan 13: Christian Drosten, who co-discovered the original SARS virus in 2003, now director of an Institute of Virology in Berlin, publishes the first paper on how to test for covid-19 ( "Diagnostic detection of Wuhan coronavirus 2019 by real-time RTPCR"). The test is adopted by the World Health Organization, that begins to circulate it, but the USA decides to develop its own test.

Jan 13: Barney Graham (who developed a Zika vaccine in 2016) sends Moderna in Boston an optimized version of the virus' RNA

Jan 14: The World Health Organization tweets that "preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus identified in Wuhan... Additional investigation is needed to ascertain the presence of human-to-human transmission" (here)

Jan 15: The first case in Shanghai (a woman from Wuhan)

Jan 15: Japan's first case (a Chinese man coming from Wuhan)

Jan 17: The genetic analysis of two Thai travel cases proves that human-to-human transmission is happening in Wuhan (paper)

Jan 18: The Wuhan Health Commission announces four new cases but tens of thousands of people are allowed to gather for the Annual Wuhan Lunar New Year banquet

Jan 18: China's government dispatches SARS expert Zhong Nanshan to Wuhan who recognizes the gravity of the situation and recommends quarantining the entire city

Jan 19: Trump's adviser Peter Navarro, an expert on China, warns the US government of the possibility of a devastating epidemic that will cost $3.8 trillion to the US economy (read it here)

Jan 19: A man dies of covid-19 in Brazil's metropolis of Rio de Janeiro (it will be discovered 4 months later by Scientists of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation)

Jan 20: Shibo Jiang of Fudan University publishes the paper "An Emerging Coronavirus Causing Pneumonia Outbreak in Wuhan" that specifically mentions human-to-human transmission and Zhong Nanshan talks about human-to-human transmission of the virus on national television CCTV and China's president Xi calls attention to it

Jan 20: The USA and South Korea both report their first cases of covid-19, respectively a returning Seattle resident who had been in Wuhan and a Chinese traveler from Wuhan (South Korea's first infected citizen will be announced 3 days later, a worker returned from Wuhan on Jan 20)

Jan 20: There have already been 412 deaths in Hubei province (according to a February 17 report by China's CDC)

Jan 21: China's People's Daily reports the covid-19 epidemic in Wuhan and quotes a top official as stating that "anyone who deliberately delays and hides the reporting of [virus] cases out of his or her own self-interest will be nailed on the pillar of shame for eternity."

Jan 21: China's CDC states that "Despite extensive searching, no animal from the market has thus far been identified as a possible source of the infection" (paper)

Jan 22: China's official death toll jumps to 17

Jan 22: Tedros Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, begins daily news briefings to warn the world that the virus is spreading and "we have a window of opportunity to stop this virus, but that window is rapidly closing"

Jan 22: The Wuhan Institute of Virology determines that the genome of this new coronavirus is 96% identical to that of a bat coronavirus (paper)

Jan 23: China locks down Wuhan but Wuhan's mayor Zhou Xianwang admits that more than 5 million people have already left Wuhan

Jan 23: Taiwan bans all Wuhan residents

Jan 23: A study by Zheng-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology shows that the new virus' genetic sequence is 96.2% identical to that of a bat coronavirus (found in horseshoe bats of Yunnan) and 79.5% identical to the SARS coronavirus (paper)

Jan 23: Singapore's first case (a Chinese tourist coming from Wuhan)

Jan 24: Taiwan stops exports of surgical face masks and orders local companies to increase production

Jan 24: Vietnam's first case, with evidence of person-to-person transmission

Jan 24: The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the new coronavirus is 86.9% identical to the bat SARS-like coronavirus (paper)

Jan 24: The first paper is published in a scientific magazine by George Gao and others of China's CDC ("A novel coronavirus outbreak of global health concern" or here) challenges the theory that the epidemic began in the Wuhan seafood market because the earliest case, a patient who became ill on Dec 1, had no link to the seafood market and 13 of the 41 original cases had no link to the Wuhan wildlife market ( summary)

Jan 24: Analyzing the viral genome, Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh estimates that the covid19 virus could have originated already in October (paper or summary

Jan 24: China's Lunar New Year holiday begins with hundreds of millions of people moving around the country but China also extends the lockdown in Hubei province and starts to build a new hospital in Wuhan

Jan 24: France reports its first three cases, three citizens returning from Wuhan (two in Paris and one in Bordeaux)

Jan 25: Taiwan suspends tours to China

Jan 25: Australia's first case, a Chinese tourist from Wuhan, and Canada's first case, a Toronto resident returning from Wuhan

Jan 25: China cancels all public events for the Lunar New Year

Jan 25: California's first case, the third case in the USA

Jan 25: Kristian Andersen at the Scripps Research Institute posts his analysis of 27 available genomes on Virological.org and concludes that they had "a most recent common ancestor" - meaning a common source - as early as 1 October 2019"

Jan 26: Anthony Fauci, the director of the USA's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, declares that the new virus poses a "very, very low risk to the United States"

Jan 26: Haitao Yang at Shanghai Tech University in China publishes on the open-access Protein Data Bank the 3D structure of Mpro, the virus's main protease (without Mpro, there is no viral replication) (paper)

Jan 27: Germany reports its first case (at Webasto headquarters in Bavaria, a German business man who met a Chinese businesswoman)

Jan 27: China's official death toll passes 100, almost all in Hubei province

Jan 28: China's National Medical Products Administration approves covid-19 test kits from five companies

Jan 29: Vancouver's (and West Canada's) first case, a national returning from Wuhan

Jan 29: A paper by George Gao of the China CDC and others states that five of the initial six patients had no exposure to the seafood market and that human-to-human transmission was underway as early as "the middle of December 2019" ("Early Transmission Dynamics in Wuhan, China, of Novel Coronavirus-Infected Pneumonia")

Jan 30: India's first case, a student returning from Wuhan

Jan 30: While claiming zero cases, North Korea declares a national emergency

Jan 30: There are only 5 confirmed cases in the USA, all of them individuals who have returned from China

Jan 30: 54 academic papers about covid-19 have been published in English-language journals, mostly written by Chinese scientists (Nature)

Jan 31: Taiwan orders face mask distribution to all schools

Jan 31: There have already been more than 900 deaths in Hubei province (according to a February 17 report by China's CDC)

Jan 31: China reports cases of covid-19 survivors getting reinfected (also on the English-language CGTN television channel).

Jan 31: After Italy discovers the first cases (two Chinese tourists in Roma), it suspends all flights from China

Jan 31: Spain's first case, a German tourist in the Canary Islands

Jan 31: The first case in Silicon Valley (a resident returning from Wuhan)

Jan 31: The first death of covid-19 outside China is recorded in the Philippines

Jan 31: Trevor Bedford at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle posts on his blog a note that the new virus spreads easily like the flu and he has been alerting authorities since Jan 20

Jan 31: Science Magazine quotes Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University, as asserting that "the virus was already circulating silently among humans before it contaminated the seafood market" (Science Magazine article)

Jan 31: The USA bars most foreigners who recently visited China from entering the USA, but no returning US citizen is screened

Feb 1, 2020: Massachusetts' first case (a young man returning from Wuhan)

Feb 2: The Philippines reports the first death outside of China, a Chinese man from Wuhan

Feb 3: South Korea starts testing for the virus

Feb 3: Shi's team discover a virus in their database, RaTG13, whose genome sequence is 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2 and has been previously detected in horseshoe bats of Yunnan (paper)

Feb 4: Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services, declares a public-health emergency, which means that only the CDC test kit can be used in the USA, and, for example, New York is forbidden to use its own working covid-19 test kit

Feb 4: Malaysia's first case (a man returning from Singapore)

Feb 5: The CDC director Robert Redfield tweets that "CDC does not currently recommend the use of facemasks to help prevent novel #coronavirus. #2019nCoV is not spreading in communities in the US."

Feb 5: CDC sends faulty test kits to about 100 labs

Feb 5: Shibo Jiang of Fudan University publishes the paper "A Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Causing Pneumonia-associated Respiratory Syndrome"

Feb 6: Taiwan bans all Chinese visitors

Feb 6: A woman dies mysteriously in Silicon Valley and two months later she is found to have had covid19 (Patricia Dowd, who worked for Lam Research, a chip manufacturing company with offices in Wuhan)

Feb 6: Silicon Valley's first death (discovered only in April) and therefore California's first

Feb 7: Wenliang Li, the doctor who first announced the existence of a new deadly coronavirus, dies

Feb 7: Britain's first case (a man returning from Singapore)

Feb 8: The official death toll of covid-19 in China (811 deaths) surpasses that of the 2002-2003 SARS epidemic

Feb 10: The World Health Organization ships 192 testing kits (containing 100 tests each) to 20 European laboratories

Feb 11: China's official death toll passes 1,000

Feb 11: China fires senior officials of Wuhan including the head of the Hubei Health Commission

Feb 12: Japan announces more than 100 cases of covid-19 on board the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship

Feb 13: China removes Hubei's provincial party secretary and Wuhan's party secretary, the first time since 2017 that top officials have been removed

Feb 14: The FDA stops the clinical virology laboratory at the University of Washington from testing for covid19

Feb 14: Egypt's (and Africa's) first case

Feb 14: France's (and Europe's) first death from covid-19

Feb 14: A 38-year old marathon runner falls sick in Italy's Lombardy region but he will be diagnosed only a week later with covid-19

Feb 15: There are already 388 cases in Italy's Lombardy region but they will be diagnosed only later

Feb 16: Louisiana celebrates Mardi Gras despite the epidemic

Feb 17: China's official death toll is 1,770 with 70,548 cases but infections start slowing down

Feb 17: China's CDC publishes its report on early infections

Feb 17: The annual meeting of the Christian Open Door Church begins in Mulhouse, eastern France

Feb 17: Anthony Fauci declares that the danger from coronavirus is "just minuscule" compared with the "real and present danger" of flu.

Feb 18: South Korea reports an outbreak linked to the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in the southern city of Daegu

Feb 19: Iran's first case and first deaths (Iranians returning to Qom from China)

Feb 19: Thousands of Valencia football fans travel from Spain to Milan for a Champions League soccer game

Feb 20: Italy's first death, in the Lombardy region

Feb 20: South Korea's first death

Feb 20: Russia bans entry for Chinese citizens

Feb 21: Israel's first case, a national returning home from the Diamond Princess cruise ship

Feb 21: Chinese scientist Yan Bai publishes the first paper that asymptomatic persons can infect others ( "Presumed Asymptomatic Carrier Transmission of COVID-19")

Feb 22: South Korea reports 229 new cases in a single day

Feb 22: New York's first case (although it will be diagnosed only on Mar 3), a Westchester man

Feb 22: Milan's Fashion Week, attended by people from all over the world, while Milan's region reports Italy's first death from covid-19

Feb 24: Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq, Afghanistan and Oman report their first cases

Feb 24: Paris Fashion Week takes off, with most people coming from Milan Fashion Week

Feb 24: Rush Limbaugh, host of the #1 radio show in the USA, claims that "the coronavirus is the common cold"

Feb 24: An Italian tourist is the first case in Spain's Canary Islands

Feb 24: Moderna in Boston delivers a candidate vaccine to the National Institutes of Health, a mere 42 days after the DNA sequence of the virus was published by the Chinese; German companies CureVac and BioNTech are also developing mRNA vaccines

Feb 25: South Korea's cases rise to 977 and Italy's to 229 while the epidemic stabilizes in China

Feb 26: More new cases are now reported outside China than inside, notably the first cases in Norway, Romania (a national who hung out with an Italian), Greece, Georgia, Pakistan and Brazil (a national returning from Italy)

Feb 26: The annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland is attended by thousands of people from all over the USA with special guest Donald Trump

Feb 27: Italy's infections jump to 650 while Estonia, Denmark and the Netherlands report their first cases

Feb 27: The first antibody ("serological") test for covid-19 is unveiled by Linfa Wang's team at Duke-NUS in Singapore (paper)

Feb 27: There are 59 cases in the USA, of which 33 are in California (but 24 are of US citizens who got sick abroad, mostly on the Diamond Princess cruise ship)

Feb 27: Chinese respiratory specialist Zhong Nanshan states at a press conference that "though the COVID-19 was first discovered in China, it does not mean that it originated from China"

Feb 27: 16,000 Muslims of the Tablighi Jamaat movement gather at a mosque in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Feb 27: Sean Hannity of Fox News (one of the top television programs of the USA) calls the measures against covid-19 a leftist conspiracy ("off the charts fearmongering") on the USA's #1 television station Fox News

Feb 27: two Chinese teams report success in using mesenchymal stem cells to treat covid-19 pneumonia ( a study in Yunnan province and a study at Beijing YouAn Hospital)

Feb 28: The CDC director Robert Redfield asks people to stop buying N95 respirators masks - and leave them for health care workers who really need them. ("There's no role for these masks in the community")

Feb 28: Nigeria's (and therefore sub-Saharan Africa's) first case, an Italian visitor

Feb 28: The World Health Organization has shipped its covid tests to more than 50 countries while the USA still doesn't have a national working test

Feb 28: Mexico's first cases, two Mexicans returning from Italy

Feb 28: Hokkaido is the first region in Japan to declare a state of emergency

Feb 28: The first death of covid-19 is reported in the USA (near Seattle). The USA has only tested 472 people.

Feb 29: Ecuador's first case, a national returning from Spain

Feb 29: The F.D.A. finally approves New York's test kit and New York can start testing

Feb 29: South Korea reports 813 new cases in one day

Feb 29: The US surgeon general Jerome Adams urges healthy people not to wear face masks (quote from his tweet: "Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus")

Feb 29: Scientists from Argentina and San Francisco's startup CASPR Biotech announce a CRISPR-based test for covid-19 (paper)

Mar 2, 2020: First cases in Saudi Arabia (a national returning from Iran), Tunisia (a national returning from Italy), Jordan (a national returning from Italy) and Morocco (a national returning from Italy)

Mar 2: Donald Trump on national television downplays both the health effects and the fatality rate of covid-19

Mar 2: Qingtian in China's Zhejiang province reports cases by Chinese nationals returning from Italy's Lombardy region

Mar 3: Indonesia's first official case, linked to a Japanese tourist

Mar 3: Argentina's first case, a man returning from Italy, and Chile's first case, a man returning from southeast Asia

Mar 3: A study by Shengjie Lai at the University of Southampton shows that China could have limited its own infections if it had acted earlier, e.g. by 66% if one week earlier, 86% if two weeks earlier, if 95% three weeks earlier (paper)

Mar 4: Italy has 3,089 cases and all schools and universities are ordered to close

Mar 4: Poland's first cases, a man who returned from Germany and two girls returning from Italy

Mar 4: The six-day Winter Party Festival, a beachside dance party for the gay community, begins in Florida

Mar 4: California's first official death is a passenger of the Diamond Princess cruise ship (in April earlier deaths will be discovered)

Mar 5: South Africa's first case, a national returning from Italy

Mar 5: German scientists prove that asymptomatic persons can infect others (paper)

Mar 5: Switzerland records its first covid death

Mar 6: The USA has carried out just 2,000 tests, whereas South Korea (with a much smaller population) has conducted more than 140,000 tests

Mar 6: The University of Washington becomes the first large college in the USA to move all classes online for its 50,000 students, followed by Stanford

Mar 6: Colombia's first case, a young Colombian woman returning from Italy, and Peru's first case, a national returning from France and Spain

Mar 7: There are more than 100,000 confirmed cases in the world and about 3,500 people have died worldwide, but mostly in the Hubei province of China (80,000 cases, about 3,000 dead)

Mar 7: Corriere della Sera publishes a leaked memo that the Italian government is about to quarantine 16 million people prompting thousands of people to leave that area

Mar 7: "Spring break" vacations begin for more than one million US students who flock to popular destinations such as Florida beaches

Mar 7: More than 3,500 people dressed up as Smurfs gather in Landerneau, Western France, to breaks the Guinness World Record

Mar 8: More than 100,000 people march in Spain's capital Madrid to celebrate International Women's Day

Mar 8: An-Suei Yang at Academia Sinica in Taiwan creates monoclonal antibodies for developing a rapid antigen-based test (paper)

Mar 9: Italy enacts a nation-wide lockdown

Mar 9: Donald Trump tweets that "last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!"

Mar 9: Sean Hannity calls the epidemic a "hoax" on the USA's #1 television station Fox News

Mar 10: First deaths in Lebanon and Morocco

Mar 10: First case in Michigan

Mar 10: Sikh religious leader Baldev Singh, who returned to India's Punjab state from virus-plagued Italy and Germany, attends the Hola Mohalla festival

Mar 11: The USA bans all travel from Europe

Mar 11: A study by Linfa Wang's team at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore suggests that the Singapore strain may be less lethal than others (paper)

Mar 11: New York's SUNY and CUNY suspend in-person classes

Mar 11: About 250,000 Muslims from many Islamic countries gather in Lahore, Pakistan, to attend the five-day Tableeghi Ijtem of a Deobandi movement

Mar 11: Madrid closes schools and universities and thousands of students travel back to their hometowns

Mar 11: First cases in Turkey (a Turkish man returning from Europe) and Bolivia

Mar 11: Peng Wang's team in Shenzhen reports that individuals with Type A blood are at higher risk of both contracting covid-19 and of dying of it than individuals with Type O blood (paper)

Mar 12: The World Health Organization declares covid a "pandemic"

Mar 12: Boris Johnson's chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance discusses on television the concept of herd immunity ("build up some degree of herd immunity, so that more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission" )

Mar 13: Trump declares a national emergency in the USA, and commercial firms are finally able to start testing for covid-19

Mar 13: Arturo Casadevall at the Johns Hopkins Hospital published his paper advocating convalescent serum therapy (paper)

Mar 13: 3,000 Muslims of the Tablighi Jamaat movement gather at a mosque in Delhi Nizamuddin, India

Mar 13: The South China Morning Post reports that Chinese government records show that the first person infected with the new virus, i.e. "patient zero", may have been a a 55-year-old man from China's Hubei province, infected on November 17 (article)

Mar 14: Spain enacts a nation-wide lockdown

Mar 14: Taiwan imposes a 14-day quarantine for all arriving travelers

Mar 15: Spain's cases jump to 7,700 with 288 deaths

Mar 15: Poland bans all foreign visitors

Mar 15: Peru and Argentina ban all foreign visitors, the first countries in South America to do so, soon followed by Ecuador and Chile

Mar 16: Malaysia bans all foreign visitors

Mar 16: Tanzania's first case

Mar 16: Germany and Spain close their land borders

Mar 16: A study published by Imperial College London predicts that, unless aggressive action is taken, the coronavirus could kill 2.2 million people in the USA

Mar 16: Liberia's first case, a government official returning from Switzerland

Mar 16: Iran has a total of 14,991 infections and 853 deaths.

Mar 16: The Bay Area's 7 million residents are told to stay home indefinitely, the first area of the USA to do so

Mar 16: France enacts a nation-wide lockdown

Mar 16: China's CanSino begins clinical trials of a recombinant vaccine based on their 2017 Ebola vaccine, China's CanSino Biologics and Beijing Inst of Biotech begin clinical trials of an inactivated covid vaccine, and Boston's Moderna begins clinical trials of its mRNA-based vaccine

Mar 16: Laura Ingraham on Fox News touts chloroquine as a cure for covid-19 ("There is such a drug. It's called chloroquine")

Mar 17: Italy has 31,506 cases with 2,503 deaths

Mar 17: Vladimir Putin declares that the covid-19 epidemic is "under control" in Russia

Mar 17: Scientists of the Scripps Research Institute publish an analysis of the coronavirus' genome showing its likely genetic path as it jumped from animals to humans but also state that "no animal coronavirus has been identified that is sufficiently similar to have served as the direct progenitor of SARS-CoV-2" ("The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2", Nature Medicine paper)

Mar 17: The European Union bans non-EU visitors (except in Ireland)

Mar 17: Italy imposes a 14-day quarantine for all arriving travelers

Mar 18: Tucker Carlson on Fox News touts hydroxychloroquine, a less toxic version of chloroquine, as a cure for covid-19

Mar 18: Israel and Russia ban all foreign visitors

Mar 18, Canada and the USA close their border

Mar 18: India bans all foreign visitors

Mar 18: Italy has 35,713 cases with 2,978 deaths

Mar 18: China reports no new cases except for Chinese returning from abroad

Mar 18: All California universities have moved their classes online

Mar 18: The Czech Republic is the first nation in Europe to make mask-wearing mandatory, followed by Slovakia one week later

Mar 19: The governor of California extends the stay-at-home order to the whole state, the first state in the USA to do so

Mar 19: Russia reports its first death of covid-19

Mar 19: The USA is now the 6th country in the world for covid-19 cases after China, Italy, Iran, Spain and Germany

Mar 19: No new cases are recorded in Wuhan for the first time

Mar 19: Hoddaido in Japan lifts the state of emergency

Mar 19: The number of deaths in Italy passes China's official number (3,405 to 3,245)

Mar 19: More than 600 cases are confirmed in 34 countries in Africa

Mar 20: The first death in India's Punjab, the Sikh preacher Baldev Singh

Mar 20: Australia bans all foreign visitors

Mar 21: The German state of Bavaria enacts a lockdown

Mar 21: Europe is now the epicentre of the epidemic with Italy reporting 53,578 cases and 4,825 deaths and Spain reporting more than 21,000 cases and more than 1,000 deaths

Mar 21: 42 of Africa's 54 countries have cases

Mar 21: The Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology announces that it will begin testing the vaccine candidate VPM1002, based on the century-old Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine, in conjunction with the Serum Institute of India, the world's largest vaccine manufacturer

Mar 22: Worldwide the death toll is more than 13,000 (using China's official numbers) out of more than 300,000 cases

Mar 22: The governor of New York issues a state-wide stay-at-home order

Mar 22: Ghana bans all foreign visitors, the first country in Africa to do so

Mar 22: Vietnam bans all foreign visitors

Mar 23: Africa's cases surpass 1,000

Mar 23: Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity tout the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a proven cure for covid-19

Mar 23: As Britain and other countries join the lockdown, about two billion people worldwide are in a partial or total lockdown

Mar 24: New York has half of the 50,000 cases of the USA and 210 of the USA's 655 deaths but only a tiny percentage of the population has been tested in the other states

Mar 24: India orders a nation-wide lockdown

Mar 24: The Lombardy region had recorded 4,178 deaths, 61% of Italy's total

Mar 25: There are 452,241 cases (officially 81,218 in China, 74,386 in Italy, 60,653 in the USA, half in New York, 47,610 in Spain) and 20,494 deaths in the world (officially 3,281 in China, 7,503 in Italy, 3,434 in Spain, 2,077 in Iran, 1,100 in France, 819 in the USA)

Mar 25: Jeremy Howard, a scientist at University of San Francisco, starts a campaign on social media under the hashtag #Masks4All, writing about "the senseless and unscientific push for the general public to avoid wearing masks"

Mar 26: South Africa begins a nation-wide lockdown

Mar 26: The US is the world's most infected country

Mar 26: China bans all foreign visitors

Mar 27: British prime minister Boris Johnson has the virus

Mar 27: Italy's daily death toll peaks at 921

Mar 27: Chinese scientists from the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen publish the first study about convalescent plasma transfusion for covid-19 (paper)

Mar 27: Interviewed by Science magazine, the director-general of China's CDC (George Gao) says: "The big mistake in the U.S. and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren't wearing masks" (interview)

Mar 27: Radio Free Asia estimates that the real death toll in Wuhan may have been more than 40,000

Mar 28: The USA (population 0.3 billion) has more people infected with covid-19 (some 120,000) than the whole of east Asia (population 2 billion)

Mar 28, 2020: The World Health Organization tweets "FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne" (this will turn out to be false: covid is airborne and facemasks are the most effective way to prevent infection)

Mar 28: Both Italy and Spain have passed China's official number of deaths (Italy 10,023 and Spain 5,812 versus China's official 3,295)

Mar 29: China limits the number of international flights to 134 nationwide

Mar 30: Every country in Latin America has cases of covid-19

Mar 30: Wired magazine posts an article titled "It's Time to Face Facts, America: Masks Work" (article)

Mar 31: Fifteen states of the USA have not issued "stay-at-home" orders (Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakora, South Dakota Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma, Texas)

Apr 1, 2020: The Western world has by far the highest number of cases and deaths in the world: the USA has 205,035 cases and 4,516 deaths, Italy 110,574 cases and 13,155 deaths, Spain 102,136 cases and 9,053 deaths, Germany 76,544 cases and 858 deaths, France 52,128 cases and 3,523 deaths, Britain 29,474 cases and 2,352 deaths.

Apr 1: Hawaii imposes a 14-day quarantine on all domestic travelers

Apr 1: South Korea imposes a 14-day quarantine on all international travelers

Apr 1: Thailand bans all foreign visitors

Apr 2: Spain's daily death toll peaks at 961

Apr 2: The total number of cases in the world passes one million

Apr 2: Indonesia bans all foreign visitors

Apr 2: Spain's death toll peaks at 950 deaths within 24 hours

Apr 3: After denying for two months that they are useful, the CDC recommends that people wear face masks but Trump says he will not wear one

Apr 3: North Korea claims to be "totally free" of covid-19

Apr 4: Spain (124,000 cases) passes Italy as the second most infected country in the world after the USA (more than 300,000 cases)

Apr 4: Louisiana (population 4.7 million) has the highest number of covid-19 deaths in the USA after New York (20 million), New Jersey (9 million) and Michigan (10 million), having passed both California (40 million), Washington state and Florida (21 million)

Apr 4: The World Health Organisation already counts 62 candidate vaccines in development worldwide

Apr 5: South Korea has 518 imported cases, mostly citizens returning from Europe and the USA

Apr 6: Deaths in the USA pass 10,000 and deaths in Britain pass 5,000 (two countries whose governments initially downplayed the epidemic)

Apr 6: The hardest hit region of Italy, Lombardy, makes face masks mandatory

Apr 6: San Diego's Inovio begins clinical testin on humans of its DNA candidate vaccine, funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), already available for animal infections

Apr 7: China reports no covid-19 deaths for the first time since its first death and the lockdown on Wuhan is partially lifted

Apr 7: New York state's daily death toll peaks at 1036

Apr 8: About 60,000 people have died in Europe of covid-19 (half of them in Spain and Italy) and 15,000 in the USA versus roughly 300 deaths in east Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong)

Apr 8: China ends the lockdown of Wuhan after 76 days

Apr 8: The official number of cases in Russia passes 10,000

Apr 8: Michael Zietz and Nicholas Tatonetti at Columbia University report that individuals with Type A blood are more likely to contract covid-19 than individuals with Type O or AB blood (paper)

Apr 9: A study by Gonzalo Otazu at the New York Institute of Technology shows that people vaccinated against tuberculosis with the bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine are less likely to die of covid-19

Apr 9: Two genomic studies (one by Harm van Bakel's team at Mount Sinai and one by Adriana Heguy's team at NYU) show that New York's covid-19 epidemic originated from Europe

Apr 9: Two genomic studies show that New York's covid-19 epidemic originated from Europe

Apr 9: The border Chinese town of Suifenhe in Heilongjiang province enters a lockdown after an influx of infected Chinese returning from Russia

Apr 10: Deaths in both Turkey and Brazil pass 1,000

Apr 10: Germany imposes a 14-day quarantine on all arriving travelers

Apr 10: Haitao Yang's team at Shanghai Tech Univ publishes the structure of the virus's replication machinery, a large protein called RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) (paper )

Apr 10: Gilead's remdesivir improves the conditions of 68% of critically-ill covid-19 patients in multiple locations of the world, but the drug is not approved for treating any disease

Apr 10: The South Korean city of Daegu, which witnessed the first large outbreak outside of China, reports zero new cases

Apr 10: Both Massachusetts and Illinois pass California for number of deaths, behind New York, New Jersey, Michigan and Louisiana

Apr 11: Britain's daily death toll peaks at 1,166

Apr 11: The USA, that now has more than half a million cases, passes Italy as the Western country with the highest death toll

Apr 12: The USA and Italy report more than 20,000 deaths total, Britain more than 10,000 and Brazil more than 1,000

Apr 12: China's Sinopharm and China National Biotech begin clinical trials of their inactivated vaccine

Apr 13: China's SinoVac (Beijing Kexing Bioproducts) begins clinical trials of its inactivated covid vaccine CoronaVac

Apr 13: New York reports than 10,000 deaths total

Apr 13: The FDA approves the first at-home coronavirus saliva test, made by a lab at Rutgers University

Apr 13: Hoddaido reintroduces the state of emergency after a spoke in new cases

Apr 14: South Korea reports that more than 100 people have been reinfected after healing

Apr 14: Poland's daily covid deaths peak at 804

Apr 14: A study by Li Lanjuan's team at Zhejiang University shows that the coronavirus is mutating rapidly and mutations affect its deadliness (paper )

Apr 15: There are more than 2 million confirmed cases and about 130,000 deaths, the vast majority in Europe and the USA (USA, Spain and Italy account for half of all deaths)

Apr 15: China's Sinovac begins clinical trial of an inactivated vaccine candidate based on their 2004 SARS vaccine

Apr 15: France's daily death toll peaks at 1,438

Apr 15: The USA's daily death toll peaks at 2,752

Apr 16: The USA accounts for about one fourth of all deaths worldwide (33,000 or about 100 per million people) while the European Union (population 446 million) has about 74,000 deaths (about 165 in one million people) and Britain has more than 13,000 (about 200 per million people) and the whole of Asia except for China and Iran has fewer than 3,000

Apr 16: Japan, hit by a second wave of infections, declares a nation-wide state of emergency

Apr 16: Charles Chiu's lab at the University of California announces a CRISPR-based test for covid-19 (paper)

Apr 17: China revises the death toll in Wuhan upwards by 50%, from 2,579 to 3,869

Apr 17: Only five US states have not issued state-wide stay-at-home orders (Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota)

Apr 17: The media suspect that more than 10,000 people have died of covid-19 in the Guayas province of Ecuador

Apr 17: German chancellor Angela Merkel declares that the outbreak is under control, with each infected person infecting less than one other person on average

Apr 17: Kathleen Mullane at the University of Chicago reports that 68% of patients cured with remdesivir improved

Apr 17: More than 8,500 people die of covid in one day in the world, the highest number since the beginning

Apr 18: Florida's governor Ron DeSanti allows some beaches to reopen

Apr 19: More than 100,000 people have died in Europe of covid-19 and more than 40,000 in the USA

Apr 19: Both Japan's and South Korea's cases of covid-19 pass 10,000, but with only about 200 deaths each

Apr 20: Urologists of Nanjing Medical University report that some covid-19 patients develop serious urinary complications including acute kidney injury (paper)

Apr 21: The USA's daily death toll peaks at 2,748 (mostly New York and nearby states)

Apr 22: The World Health Organization estimates that almost half of all deaths in Europe happened in nursing homes

Apr 23: Germany makes face masks compulsory in public

Apr 24: New York state tests around 7,500 people for covid-19 antibodies and 14.9% show covid-19 infections

Apr 24: Biotech company Mesoblast reports success treating severe covid-19 cases with mesenchymal stem cells at Mount Sinai Hospital

Apr 25: More than 200,000 deaths have been reported worldwide, the vast majority in the Western nations as the USA passes 50,000 deaths and Italy, Spain, France and Britain all have more than 20,000

Apr 27: British scientists warn that covid-19 may be tied to a rare syndrome in children, similar to toxic shock syndrome and Kawasaki disease (paper)

Apr 27: The World Health Organization (WHO) launches the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator Initiative to develop a rapid, cheap and safe test with funding from the European Union, the Gates Foundation and other philanthropists (the USA and Russia do not join, China joins a few days later)

Apr 28: The death rate per million people is 500 in Spain, 450 in Italy, 350 in France and 320 in Britain, compared with 76 in Germany, and compared with 4.7 in South Korea and 3 in Japan

Apr 28: Mount Sinai Hospital in New York reports five cases of stroke in patients younger than 50 infected with covid-19 (paper)

Apr 29: Britain reports 26,097 total deaths, second only to Italy's 27,682 in Europe and ahead of Spain's 24,275 (but Spain has higher per-capita rate than both) while the USA passes 60,000

Apr 29: Bette Korber's team at Los Alamos National Laboratory argues that a new more contagious strain appeared in February in Europe and migrated to the East Coast of the USA and has become dominant worldwide since mid-March (paper)

Apr 30: No new cases are reported in South Korea and Hong Kong

Apr 30: Russian prime minister Mikhail Mishustin tests positive

Apr 30: Japan reports a record 328 daily infections

May 2, 2020: French doctor Yves Cohen claims that people were already dying of covid-19 in Paris as early as Dec 27

May 2: Alina Chan of the Broad Institute shows that the virus of covid does not behave like viruses normally behave and leaves open the option that it could have been engineered in a lab (paper)

May 3: Russia and Brazil have the fastest growing infections of all major countries

May 4: Spain has conducted 41332 covid-19 tests per million people, Italy 35622, Germany 30400, Russia 29465, the USA 21742, Britain 17771, France 16856, South Korea 12310, Brazil 1597, and Japan only 1450

May 5: Britain's death toll overtakes Italy's with more than 32,000 deaths, the highest in Europe and second in the world after the USA

May 5: Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute in Boston announces a covid-19 test based on CRISPR instead of PCR (paper)

May 5: The New York Times reports that 15 children have been hospitalized with a "multisystem inflammatory syndrome potentially associated with Covid-19."

May 5: There are 108 potential covid-19 vaccines in development around the world, according to the World Health Organization

May 6: Russia is now fifth in the world for number of cases, behind USA, Spain, Italy and Britain, and Moscow's mayor Sergei Sobyanin admits that the real number of cases in the city is around 300,000, more than triple the official figure, which would make Russia second only to the USA

May 9: Anthony Fauci (the same man who four months earlier said the risk to the USA was "very, very low") declares that this virus "is so transmissible, and it is so widespread throughout the world, that even if our infections get well controlled and go down dramatically during the summer, there is virtually no chance it will be eradicated".

May 9: A Korean study shows that many asymptomatic patients are left with lung abnormalities (paper)

May 10: Just days after easing some restrictions South Korea, China and Germany all report an increase in new cases, including the first new case in Wuhan in a month

May 10: Brazil's death toll passes 10,000, the sixth highest in the world, while the infection slows in Italy, Spain and France

May 10: More than 2,000 people attend the Cottonwood Rodeo in rural California despite state orders against public gatherings

May 10: Malaysia declares the second nationwide lockdown in a year

May 11: New York state reports 73 cases of children who are severely ill with symptoms similar to Kawasaki disease

May 11: NBC unveils a secret White House report that shows infection rates spiking in the US heartland, recording weekly increases of 72.4% or higher in Central City (Kentucky), Nashville (Tennessee), Des Moines (Iowa), Amarillo (Texas), and alarming rates in Charlotte (North Carolina), Kansas City (Missouri), Omaha and Lincoln (Nebraska), Minneapolis (Minnesota), Montgomery (Alabama), Columbus (Ohio) and Phoenix (Arizona)

May 12: France overtakes Spain in number of deaths, fourth country in the world after the USA, Britain and Italy, while Russia's number of cases is now second only to the USA

May 12: A report by Tongji Hospital in Wuhan describes five cases of children who were hospitalized with non-respiratory symptoms and tested positive for covid-19 (paper)

May 13: Brazil has the sixth highest death toll in the world as Latin America rapidly becomes the epicenter of covid-19 with many unreported deaths

May 14: 100 academics from all over the world write an open letter to all the state governors of the USA pleading for making face masks mandatory in public.

May 14: A study by Jeremy Faust of Harvard Medical School and Carlos del Rio of Emory University shows that COVID-19 kills 20 times more people per week than the flu does (based on COVID-19 and flu fatalities in peak weeks counted and reported directly, not estimated) (paper)

May 15: More than 90% of the US population is under mandatory lockdown and more than 20 states impose 14-day self-quarantines to travelers

May 15: Jamaica Hospital in New York reports patients who suffered strokes infected with Covid-19 (paper)

May 15: Spain imposes a 14-day quarantine for all arriving foreigners

May 17: As infections and deaths decline all over Europe, Russia and Latin America become the new epicenters of the pandemic

May 18: During a virtual World Health Assembly meeting, more than 100 countries call for an "impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation" of the response to the covid-19 pandemic

May 18: Spain has the highest per-capita deaths of major countries (593 per million), followed by Italy (529), Britain (513), and Sweden (366) and in the USA it varies by state: the highest death rate on the east coast is in New York state (1464), the highest in the Midwest is in Michigan (492), the highest in the south is in Louisiana (551), while it is very small on the west coast, for example in California (84).

May 20: Dan Barouch at Harvard reports of a DNA vaccine that protects monkeys against covid-19. (paper)

May 21: Brazil's death toll passes 20,000

May 22: While cases decline on the east and west coasts of the USA, the highest increases of cases are reported by Tennessee (33%), Louisiana (25%) and Texas (22%)

May 23: Brazil has the second highest number of cases after the USA, ahead of Russia, Spain and Britain (but Russia reports very few deaths compared with the others)

May 24: For the first time in four months Italy's region Lombardy reports no covid-19 deaths

May 25: During the national Memorial Day holiday of the USA, huge crowds flock to beaches in Florida, Missouri, Maryland, Georgia, Virginia and Indiana

May 26: The death toll in the USA passes $100,000

May 26: Junshi Biosciences of Shanghai reports that its antibodies CA1 and CB6 reduce covid-19 infection levels in rhesus macaques ( paper)

May 26: Protests erupt in many cities of the USA after a black man is killed by the police

May 26: The USA witnesses mass gatherings nationwide to protest the police killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd

May 26: You-Chun Wang's team at the National Institutes for Food and Drug Control in Beijing uses CRISPR to genetically engineer mice that can express the human ACE2 receptor, the cell receptor that allows coronaviruses to infect human lungs (paper)

May 26: Scientists of China's CDC declare on Chinese state media that they have ruled out the possibility that the Wuhan wildlife market was the origin of the virus Gao Fu, the director of the Chinese CDC, told Chinese state media "It now turns out that the market is one of the victims."

May 27: France, that was the first country to test it, bans the use of hydroxychloroquine as covid-19 treatment

May 31: Brazil, with its 28,834 official deaths, is second only to the USA, Britain and Italy, and has 498,440 confirmed cases, second only the USA's 1.77 million.

May 31: A study by China's CDC warns that airborne transmission (by "aerosols") plays a major role in spreading the virus (paper)

Jun 1, 2020: Italy reports the lowest number of new infections since February 26 and only 60 deaths

Jun 2: Spain reports zero new deaths in the last 24 hours for the first time since March.

Jun 2: A study finds that in the USA more than 25% of deaths (about 26,000) happened in nursing homes.

Jun 2: Mexico's death toll passes 10,000

Jun 5: The University of Oxford ends a large trial of the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine after their study shows no benefit from the drug for covid-19 patients (announcement)

Jun 5: Brazil overtakes Italy to become the country with the third-highest death toll worldwide after the USA and Britain

Jun 5: People in Beijing are allowed to go out without wearing a mask for the first time in months

Jun 5: Based on new studies, the World Health Organization recommends wearing face masks even in public

Jun 6: India overtakes Italy in number of cases, becoming the sixth country for number of infections after the USA, Brazil, Russia, Spain and Britain, but per capita it is one of the least infected

Jun 6: More than 400,000 people have died of covid-19 around the world, the vast majority in Europe and North America, with the highest per-capita toll in Western Europe

Jun 6: Thanks to more ubiquitous testing, the number of known cases is doubling every week in many developing countries like Iraq, Mozambique and Uganda, and doubling every two weeks in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, India and South Africa

Jun 7: New Zealand has no active covid-19 infections after the last remaining patient recovered.

Jun 8: Brazil is now suffering the highest daily number of deaths in the world, more than 1,000 per day

Jun 9: 14 states of the USA record their worst week yet for new infections (Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Carolina, Mississippi, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah) with California alone posting a 40% rise in cases and Texas posting a record number of hospitalizations, and a leaked CDC study shows that the USA had the highest spike of daily infections among the major countries while in Europe they are declining

Jun 11: After 55 days without a single infection, Beijing reports a cluster in a food market of the southern Fengtai district

Jun 12: Brazil's death toll (41,828) passes Britain's (41,481) and is second only to the USA's (116,723) while all continental European countries report fewer than 100 deaths per day, but the highest per-capita death tolls remain Britain's, Spain's, Italy's, Sweden's and France's

Jun 12: A study by Hong Kong University shows that many asymptomatic patients are left with lung abnormalities (paper)

Jun 15: The FDA revokes emergency authorization of the antimalarian drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, deeming them useless and possibly harmful to treat covid-19

Jun 16: Oxford University announces a treatment for covid-19, the low-dose steroid treatment dexamethasone

Jun 16: The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington estimates 201,129 deaths due to covid-19 in the USA through the beginning of October

Jun 17: David Ellinghaus and others in Germany report a higher risk for severe illness among individuals with Type A blood and a protective effect for Type O blood (paper)

Jun 17: The Brazilian Society of Infectious Diseases publishes an open letter calling "urgent and necessary" to halt the use of hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of Covid-19, the drug recommended by president Bolsonaro (and by Donald Trump in the USA)

Jun 18: A study by Chongqing Medical University in China finds that antibody levels fade within a few months in recovering patients who had mild or no symptoms (paper)

Jun 20: Italy's National Institute of Health reports that sewage water from both Milan and Turin contained covid-19 traces already on December 18, more than two months before the first reported case

Jun 21: Brazil's death toll surpasses 50,000

Jun 21: South Korea reports a second wave of infections in Seoul, which had previously seen few cases

Jun 24: More than 100,000 people have died in Latin America

Jun 25: After containing the pandemic, the state of New York imposes a quarantine on travelers coming from states that have spikes of infections (Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Utah)

Jun 26: India cancels all railway transportation

Jun 27: More than 500,000 people have died worldwide, about 128,000 in the USA (46,000 in New York and New Jersey), 56,000 in Brazil and 44,000 in Britain, but the highest per-capita deaths are still in Europe, notably in Britain (641), Spain (606), Italy (574), Sweden (523) and France (456)

Jun 27: The death toll in New York is only 5, the lowest since March 15

Jun 29: Two studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine report almost 300 children who developed Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) after contracting covid-19

Jul 1, 2020: The European Union reopens its borders to 14 countries, including Japan, South Korea, Canada and Australia, but not to the highly infected countries of Brazil, Russia and USA

Jul 2: Faced with a rapid rise in cases, Texas mandates face coverings in public spaces

Jul 4: 239 physicians and physicists sign an open letter claiming that covid is airborne, i.e. it spreads mainly via aerosols (and the main way to prevent its spreading is to wear facemasks)

Jul 6: Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro tests positive

Jul 6: Dozens of scientists sign an open letter to the WHO emphasizing airborne transmission of covid-19 via aerosols (paper)

Jul 7: The USA reports more than 60,000 new cases in 24 hours, with California and Texas each reporting more than 10,000 new cases

Jul 10: A French study shows that about 1.2% of infected men in their 30s require hospitalization (paper)

Jul 11: New York City reports zero coronavirus deaths for the first time since March 13

Jul 13: Mexico passes Italy and has now the 4th highest death toll (35,000) after Britain (45,000), Brazil (73,000) and the USA (138,000)

Jul 15: Thailand has recorded fewer than 3,240 cases and 58 deaths

Jul 16: Florida reports a record 156 coronavirus deaths in 24 hours

Jul 16: Thailand only has recorded 58 covid deaths, Vietnam only 1, and all of Indochina (as well as the Yunnan province of China) have recorded very few cases

Jul 19: More than 600,000 people have died with the coronavirus around the world, a quarter of them in the USA, with the number of new cases rising by almost 260,000 in 24 hours

Jul 19: The highest death rate per million people is Britain's 667, followed by Spain 608, Italy 580, Sweden 556, France 462, Chile 445, USA 433 Peru 400, Brazil 374 compared with Germany's 109, Finland's 59, Norway's 47 Japan's 8 South Korea's 6, Australia's 5, New Zealand's 4, Thailand's 0.8, Taiwan's 0.3 and Vietnam's 0 (1,777 in New Jersey, 1,674 in New York, 1,223 in Massachusetts, 763 in Louisiana, 637 in Michigan, 591 in Illinois, 553 in Pennsylvania, 299 in Georgia, 232 in Florida, 195 in California, 140 in Texas)

Jul 20: China's cinemas reopens after being closed for six months

Jul 22: China authorizes emergency use of the inactivated vaccines made by Sinopharm and Sinovac

Jul 25: Covid deaths in the USA top 1,000 for the fourth consecutive day

Jul 25: South Korea reports its largest daily increase of cases since April

Jul 25: A new outbreak in Danang, which ends Vietnam's 99-day streak of no new cases, is caused by a strain of covid-19 that is three times more contagious than the previous one

Jul 27: A study by Valentina Puntmann at the University Hospital Frankfurt shows that, even months after recovery, covid-19 patients exhibit lingering heart damage (paper)

Jul 27: Eike Nagel's team at University Hospital Frankfurt in Germany finds that many recovered asymptomatic patients and patients with mild symptoms have persistent heart abnormalities (paper)

Jul 29: The death toll in the USA passes 150,000 with New York State reporting only a handful of deaths per day and Texas posting the highest death toll per capita, followed by Arizona and South Carolina

Jul 29: A study by the CDC finds that 27% of all the reported cases before March 11 had travel links to Italy, while 22% had been to China and 11% had travelled from Iran (paper)

Jul 29: Sweden's death toll is 567 deaths per million people, close to Italy's 581, compared with Denmark's 106, Finland's 59, and Norway's 47

Jul 30: The USA reports 1,400 covid-19 deaths, the most in a single day since May 15, and more people died of covid-19 in just one state, Texas, than in the 5 major countries of Western Europe combined

Jul 31: Vietnam reports its first covid-19 death and a new cluster of infections in Danang

Jul 31: US coronavirus deaths rise by 1,453, the biggest increase since May 27, with Florida reporting a record 257 deaths and California a record 208 deaths, and California becaming the first US state to have over 500,000 cases and Florida second with over 470,000 cases

Jul 31: Mexico overtakes Britain for number of deaths (47,000), third behind the USA (157,000) and Brazil (93,000) but Britain remains #1 for death per capita (680 per million people), followed by Spain and Italy

Aug 1, 2020: The death toll in Latin America passes the 200,000 mark

Aug 4: Daniela Weiskopf's team at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology reports that people who have been infected with common cold viruses are less likely to die of covid-19 because their immune system recognizes SARS-CoV-2 (paper)

Aug 5: More than 700,000 people have died from covid-19 worldwide (162,000 in the USA, about 130,000 in Western Europe, about 100,000 in Brazil, about 50,000 in Mexico, 46,000 in Britain, and more than 40,000 in India) but only 1,000 in Japan, 300 in South Korea, 10 in Vietnam and 7 in Taiwan)

Aug 7: The pandemic has killed more than 210,000 people in Latin America

Aug 11: New Zealand reports the first new cases after 102 days without recording a locally transmitted case

Aug 11: Russia approves the recombinant adenovirus-based "Sputnik V" vaccine, developed by Denis Logunov's team at the Gamaleya National Research Centre for Epidemiology and Microbiology (paper)

Aug 13: The USA records 1,500 new deaths, the highest daily toll since mid-May.

Aug 13: The WHO declares that Latin America is now the epicenter of the pandemic, with Brazil reporting the second highest number of cases in the world after the USA and passing 100,000 deaths, and with Mexico passing 50,000 deaths.

Aug 13: A New York Times investigation unveils that the true covid-19 toll in the USA has probably already surpassed 200,000 (article)

Aug 16: India passes 50,000 deaths, fourth behind the USA, Brazil and Mexico

Aug 17: Some 315 people connected to South Korea's Sarang Jeil Church test positive in the country's biggest outbreak for months

Aug 17: China grants a patent to CanSino for the covid-19 vaccine candidate Ad5-nCOV or Convidecia

Aug 22: A new wave of infections, originating from the neofascist Christian cult Sarang Jeil, spreads to all 17 provinces of South Korea

Aug 25: A study by Todd McDevitt's team at UC San Francisco shows that covid-19 damages heart cells (paper)

Aug 26: The USA approves Abbott's rapid and cheap antigen test BinaxNow

Aug 29: Italy reports only one covid death in one day

Sep 1, 2020: A study by Saitama Medical University in Japan shows that many asymptomatic patients are left with lung abnormalities (paper)

Sep 6: Britain records almost 3,000 infections, the highest figure since May 22

Sep 7: China's Sinopharm announces that it has already vaccinated hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens

Sep 8: Nine pharmaceutical companies (Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, BioNTech, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novavax and Sanofi) pledge that they would not launch a vaccine until its safety has been properly tested

Sep 10: France records almost 10,000 new cases in 24 hours, the highest single-day count since the start of the outbreak

Sep 16: The USA passes 200,000 deaths by covid, just a bit less than the European total of 210,000 (Britain + France + Spain + Italy + ...), followed by Brazil with 134,000, India with 83,000, Mexico with 71,000, Britain with 41,000; and the US death rate passes Italy's (608 to 590 per million people)

Sep 16: A study by Nanchang University in China suggests that wearing eyeglasses reduces the chances of getting infected (paper)

Sep 18: Israel becomes one of the few countries to impose a second nationwide lockdown

Sep 18: Spain records more than 14,000 new cases in 24 hours

Sep 20: The USA's death rate passes Britain's (616 to 615 deaths per million people) and becomes the second highest of major Western countries after Spain (652) but Peru (948), Bolivia (651), Brazil (643), Chile (641) and Ecuador (626) have higher death rates in the Americas

Sep 21: Betsy Herold's group at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York presents a theory why children are mostly immune (paper)

Sep 24: France records more than 10,000 new cases in 24 hours, the highest single-day count since the start of the outbreak, and Britain records 6,600 new cases

Sep 24: Daily covid deaths in Brazil peak at 1,703

Sep 27: More than one million people have died in the world of covid, of which 210,000 in the USA, 141,000 in Brazil, 96,000 in India, 76,000 in Mexico, 42,000 in Britain, 36,000 in Italy, 32,000 in Peru, and 31,000 in France and Spain

Sep 28: The World Health Organization (WHO) approves the rapid and cheap test developed by South Korea's SD BioSensor/Roche through the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator Initiative

Oct 1, 2020: Trump, his wife and many others of their circle test positive for covid

Oct 2: A study by Becton Dickinson shows that a quick antigen-based test is better at identifying covid than the slow and expensive PCR test (paper)

Oct 3: India's official death toll passes 100,000

Oct 5: Iran reports 235 covid deaths, its highest daily count yet

Oct 5: A new variant is identified in India, B.1.617

Oct 12: A study by Alyssa Bilinski of Harvard and Ezekiel Emanuel of UPenn shows that Sweden and the USA are the only countries with high overall mortality rates that have failed to rapidly reduce those numbers (paper)

Oct 16: An international study coordinated by the W.H.O. finds no benefits for covid-19 from remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, interferon, and lopinavir-ritonavir (paper) , but other sudies show that remdesivir has been effective in reducing recovery time by a third

Oct 17: The city of Yiwu in eastern China begins vaccinating people against covid-19

Oct 17: The states of the USA that report the highest record new cases are Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming

Oct 18: The highest date rates in the world are now found in the Americas, followed by Western Europe (Peru 1018 per million people, Brazil 722, Bolivia 722, Spain 722, Chile 711, Ecuador 698, USA 677, Mexico 665, Britain 642, Italy 605, Sweden 585, Argentina 576, Colombia 564)

Oct 19: China becomes the first major economy to recover from covid-19

Oct 19: More Czech people have died of covid the beginning of October than throughout the past eight months combined

Oct 21: There have been more than one million known cases in Spain, the sixth country in the world to achieve this milestone after the USA, India, Brazil, Russia and Argentina

Oct 24: Poland's president Duda tests positive

Oct 25: France too hits the one-million-case mark

Oct 25: A Swiss-Spanish study reveals that the variant 20A.EU1 emerged in Spain in early summer and now accounts for the majority of sequences in the whole of Europe, including 90% of recent coronavirus sequences in Britain (paper)

Oct 26: Latin America has a third of the world's covid deaths (157,000 in Brazil; 89,000 in Mexico; 34,200 in Peru; 30,300 in Colombia; 29,300 in Argentina; 14,000 in Chile)

Oct 27: The highest death rates (deaths per million people) are in Peru (1033), Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, USA, Mexico, Britain, Argentina, Italy, Colombia, Sweden and France (544)

Oct 27: The states of the USA with the highest number of cases per million people are North Dakota, South Dakota, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Iowa, Tennessee, Florida, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Idaho, South Carolina, Utah, Nebraska, Georgia, Arizona, Texas, Nevada, Illinois, Oklahoma

Oct 27: The USA reports 60,000 new cases in one day, and France, Italy, Britain and Spain more than 20,000, compared with Japan 618, South Korea 103, China 42, Australia 14, Vietnam only 1 (the USA reports 800 new deaths compared with 5 in Japan, 2 in Australia, 1 in South Korea and zero in China)

Oct 28: Europe reports a record 1.5 million cases

Oct 29: The USA reports a record 90,000 cases in one day

Oct 30: France and Germany introduce new lockdowns

Oct 30: The USA reports a record 100,000 cases in one day

Nov 4, 2020: Denmark reports that a genetic variant of covid has been spread by minks to at least 12 people and announces a plan to exterminate all its minks

Nov 5: Italy reports 445 deaths, the highest number since April, pushing the total over 40,000; France reports a record 58,000 new cases; Britain introduces a new lockdown; the USA reports a record 123,000 new cases and 1,226 deaths

Nov 5: More than 8,800 people die of covid in one day in the world, the highest number since April

Nov 6: France reports a record number of daily new cases, 60,400

Nov 7: Italy reports a record number of daily new cases, 39,809

Nov 9: BioNTech's covid vaccine offers 90% protection (press release)

Nov 9: The countries with the highest death toll are the USA (244,182), Brazil (162,628), India (127,104), Mexico (95,027), Britain (49,238), Italy (41,750), France (40,987) and Spain (39,345)

Nov 10: The USA authorizes the use of a covid-19 antibody drug developed by Eli Lilly called Bamlanivimab

Nov 10: Britain's death toll passes 50,000

Nov 10: The European countries with the highest number of infections per capita are the Czech Republic, Switzerland, and Belgium

Nov 10: Jean-Laurent Casanova's team at Rockefeller University publishes two studies, one by Qian Zhang (paper) and one by Paul Bastard (paper), that individuals without specific interferons are more likely to die of covid-19, and the absence of such interferons depends on genetic mutations which cause neutralizing autoantibodies against those interferons

Nov 11: A study by Italy's National Cancer Institute about people who were screened for cancer in Lombardy shows that several patients already had covid antibodies in early October 2019 (paper)

Nov 12: A study by University of North Carolina shows that the 614G variant "exhibits more efficient infection, replication, and competitive fitness" than the original Wuhan virus (paper)

Nov 13: Adaptive Technologies reports that its T-cell test T-Detect Covid is more effective than antibody tests (paper)

Nov 15: Around mid November a new variant, P1, begins spreading in the Brazilian city of Manaus but it won't be identified until 2021

Nov 16: Moderna announces that its covid vaccine offers 94.5% protection

Nov 16: Chicago enacts a new stay-at-home order

Nov 17: The USA reports 1,707 covid deaths, the highest toll in six months, and Italy reports 753 deaths, the highest toll since April

Nov 18: A study by Imperial College London shows that clusters of 614G infections grow faster than infections from the original Wuhan virus (paper).

Nov 18: The death toll in the USA passes 250,000

Nov 18: More than 11,000 people die of covid in the world in just one day

Nov 19: Japan reports a record 2,179 new cases in one day

Nov 19: Mexico's death toll passes 100,000, the fourth country to reach this mark after the USA, Brazil and India

Nov 19: Texas' death toll passes 20,000, the second US state to reach this mark after New York

Nov 23: Oxford announces strong protection offered by its chimpanzee adenoviral vector vaccine ChAdOx1

Nov 23: Canada's largest city Toronto begins a new lockdown as infections soar

Nov 23: Italy's total covid death toll passes 50,000

Nov 24: The number of daily covid deaths in the USA passes 2,000 for the first time since May

Nov 24: France's total covid death toll passes 50,000

Nov 25: The USA reports 2,313 covid deaths in one day

Nov 25: Germany reports a record 410 covid deaths in one day

Nov 25: Russia reports a record 507 covid deaths in one day and Poland reports a record 674 covid deaths in one day

Nov 25: More than 12,000 people die of covid in the world in one day

Nov 26: Japan reports 376 daily infections, exceeding the previous record of 328 on April 30

Nov 26: South Korea reports 583 daily infections, the highest number since March

Nov 30: Almost 13,000 people have died of covid in Italy in the month of November, and about 39,000 in the USA

Nov 30: The average daily number of new cases reaches 170,000 in the USA in what is by far the world's largest outbreak (by comparison, China has fewer than 20 cases a day)

Nov 30: 37,000 people died in the USA of covid-19 in November

Nov 30: A retrospective serological study by the CDC finds that covid antibodies were present in blood samples taken in mid December in several locations of the USA (paper)

Dec 2, 2020: Britain approves BioNTech's covid vaccine, developed in Germany by Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci

Dec 2: Sweden records 174 covid deaths in one day, its highest number yet

Dec 2: Following the Thanksgiving holiday, the USA records 2,760 covid deaths in one day

Dec 3: Italy records 993 covid deaths in one day

Dec 3: Covid hospitalizations reaches a record 100,000 in the USA (double the peak in the spring)

Dec 5: California reports more than 25,000 new cases and more than 200 deaths

Dec 8: Britain is the first country to launch a nation-wide vaccination program (with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine)

Dec 8: Germany's covid death toll surpasses 20,000

Dec 9: The USA records 3,124 deaths in 24-hour period, the highest total in a single day anywhere in the world

Dec 9: Italy's death toll per capita passes 1,000, second only to Belgium and Peru, just ahead of Spain, Britain and the USA

Dec 10: Germany records 585 covid deaths and 29,875 new infections in one day, its highest numbers ever

Dec 10: Russia records 613 covid deaths in one day, its highest numbers ever

Dec 10: A study by Aaron Ring's team at Yale Univ shows that auto-antibodies in covid-19 patients that caused severe damage instead of fighting the virus (paper)

Dec 12: South Korea reports 950 new infections, its highest daily count ever

Dec 13: The USA begis a nation-wide vaccination program (with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine)

Dec 13: Italy's death toll passes Britain's death toll, the highest in Europe

Dec 14: The USA passes 300,000 covid deaths

Dec 15: Britain identifies a new covid variant ("B117"), estimated to have been circulating since September, which has 23 mutations in its genome and is 70% more contagious than the previous one and 60% deadlier (paper)

Dec 16: Germany records 952 deaths in one day, its highest number yet

Dec 16: The USA records 3,656 deaths in one day, its highest number yet

Dec 17: French president Emmanuel Macron tests positive for covid

Dec 17: The European continent (52 countries) passes 500,000 covid deaths , followed by Latin America with 477,000

Dec 20: Several European countries ban flights and trains from Britain to avoid spreading the British variant

Dec 20: France passes 60,000 covid deaths, third behind Italy (68,400) and Britain (67,400) in Europe, ahead of Russia (50,800) and Spain (49,000)

Dec 21: Tulio de Oliveira's team in South Africa reports a new covid variant dubbed 501Y.V2 (aka B.1.351)with multiple spike mutations (paper)

Dec 23: Italy passes 70,000 covid deaths

Dec 25: Britain passes 70,000 covid deaths

Dec 26: The USA passes 329,000 covid deaths, which means that one in thousand US citizen has died of covid

Dec 27: Spain passes 50,000 covid deaths

Dec 28: All these countries have lost more than one person per thousand inhabitants: Italy (1.179), Peru (1.129), Spain (1.072), Britain (1.045), USA (1.032)

Dec 29: Russia's deputy prime minister admits that the real number of covid deaths is likely to be about 186,000 rather than the official figure of 55,827 covid deaths, which would make Russia third after the USA and Brazil for covid deaths

Dec 29: California records 442 covid deaths in one day, the highest number yet

Dec 29: Germany records 1,129 covid deaths in one day, the highest number yet

Dec 30: Britain approves the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, much cheaper and easier to transport than the Biontech-Pfizer vaccine

Dec 31: Covid has killed more than 1,800,000 people worldwide, more than 540,000 in Europe, more than 350,000 in the USA, more than 500,000 in Latin America, , more than 150,000 in India, but less than 5,000 in China, less than 3,500 in Japan and less than 1,000 in South Korea

Dec 31: Covid has killed 16,718 people in Germany in the month of december, half of the total of the year

Jan 1, 2021: California records 585 covid deaths in one day, the highest number yet

Jan 2: Britain records 57,725 new infections in one day

Jan 3: The covid death toll in the USA passes 350,000

Jan 5: Britain imposes its second lockdown

Jan 5: The USA reports 3,775 covid deaths, the deadliest day of the pandemic

Jan 6: The USA reports 3,964 covid deaths in one day, another record

Jan 6: Britain reports 1,041 covid deaths in one day and Germany 1,078

Jan 6: Japan discovers a new covid variant, P1, in travelers that have arrived from Brazil (paper)

Jan 7: The USA reports 4,100 covid deaths in one day, another record

Jan 7: Japan declares a state of emergency in Tokyo's metropolitan area as cases hit a daily record of 2,447 in the city

Jan 7: Israel enters a new lockdown with record infections

Jan 7: China places millions of people under lockdown after more than 300 cases are discovered in the cities of Shijiazhuang and Xingtai in Hebei province

Jan 7: Brazil passes 200,000 covid deaths and India passes 150,000

Jan 7: Italy's death rate is 1,279 per million people, Britain's is 1,153, the USA's is 1,127, Spain's is 1,105, France's 1,023, Mexico's 1,011, Brazil's 940, Sweden's 914

Jan 7: South Korea reports a record 35 covid deaths in one day

Jan 7: The covid death rate in New York state is 2,012, followed by Massachusetts with 1,873, the Dakotas with about 1,750, Mississippi with 1,701, Louisiana with 1,662, Illinois with 1,495, Michigan with 1,389, Pennsylvania with 1,349 (California's is 722)

Jan 9: California reports 695 deaths in one day, its highest daily toll yet

Jan 11: Both Texas' and California's death tolls pass 30,000 , second only to New York's 39,800

Jan 11: The major countries with the highest death rate are Italy (1,311 per million people), Britain (1,204), USA (1,161 per million people), Peru (1,154), Spain (1,118), France (1,041), Mexico (1,036), Argentina (983), Brazil (954), Sweden (954), Colombia (908), Chile (895) while Germany has a death rate of 506, Israel 405, Japan 32, South Korea 23 and China 3

Jan 12: The USA reports 4,327 covid deaths in one day, another record

Jan 12: China expands the lockdown to 22 million people after detecting an average of 109 new cases a day in one week

Jan 13: Britain reports 1,564 covid deaths in one day and Germany 1,244

Jan 13: South Africa reports a record 806 covid deaths in one day

Jan 14: China reports the first covid death in 8 months

Jan 14: Sweden reports 351 covid deaths in one day, the highest ever

Jan 14: The hot spot of covid is again the Western world as, among major countries, the highest death tolls per capita of the last seven days are in Britain, Sweden, Germany, USA and Italy

Jan 15: More than 2 million people have died worldwide of covid (402,000 in the USA, 209,000 in Brazil, 153,000 in India, 138,000 in Mexico, 87,000 in Britain, 81,000 in Italy, 70,000 in France, and probably more than 200,000 in Russia)

Jan 19: The USA passes 400,000 covid deaths (100,000 have died in just 36 days)

Jan 19: Mexico reports a record 1,584 covid deaths in one day

Jan 20: Britain reports 1,820 covid deaths in one day and Germany 1,734

Jan 20: Colombia passes 50,000 total covid deaths

Jan 22: Germany's covid death toll passes 50,000

Jan 22: Mexico reports 1,803 covid deaths in one day

Jan 22: South Africa passes 40,000 total covid deaths

Jan 23: Among major countries, the highest death tolls per capita are in Britain (1429 per million people), Italy (1424), USA (1288), Hungary (1234), Peru (1192), Spain (1186), Mexico (1149), France (1115), Sweden (1086), Switzerland (1041), Argentina (1029), Brazil (1014), and among US states the highest are in New York (2170), Massachusetts (2040), Mississippi (1933), South Dakota (1917), Louisiana (1825), Arizona (1672), Illinois (1629), Pennsylvania (1606), Michigan (1520)

Jan 25: Mexico's president Obrador has covid

Jan 26: For five days Portugal has had the most daily deaths per capita in the world

Jan 26: Mexico's death toll passes 150,000

Jan 26: Brazil reports 1,214 covid deaths in one day, the highest toll since July 24

Jan 27: Britain's death toll passes 100,000 with a record 1,725 daily deaths

Jan 27: America has reported about one million deaths, of which 400,000 in the USA, more than 200,000 in Brazil, 150,000 in Mexico and more than 50,000 in Colombia; Europe has reported almost 700,000 deaths; Asia has reported a total of 325,000 deaths (half of them from India), and Africa has reported about 80,000 (half of them in South Africa)

Jan 29: It took six months for California's covid death toll to reach 10,000, then four months to reach 20,000, then just five more weeks to reach 30,000 and then only 20 days to reach 40,000.

Jan 31: January is the deadliest yet in the USA with over 95,000 covid deaths

Jan 31: The first confirmed case of reinfection with the South African variant is reported in France (paper)

Jan 31: More than 3,000 people have died in one month in the Brazilian city of Manaus, mostly because of the P1 variant

Feb 1, 2021: More than 100 million doses of covid-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide in 64 countries; the USA has vaccinated 32.2 million people, China 24 million, Britain 9.79 million, Israel 4.99 million and India 3.95 million; Israel has the highest vaccination rate, 57.65 doses per 100 people, followed by the United Arab Emirates (34.79 per 100 people), Britain (14.42), Bahrain (10.16) and the USA (9.63) while the European Union's vaccination rate is only 2.86 doses per 100 people

Feb 2: Japan reports a record 119 covid deaths in one day

Feb 2: A Russian study shows that the Sputnik V vaccine gives around 92% protection against covid-19 (paper)

Feb 3: The USA passes 450,000 covid deaths

Feb 3: A study by Oliver Ratmann's team at Imperial College in London shows that adults aged 35 to 49 accounted for 41% of covid infections in the USA, adults 20 to 34 were responsible for another 35%, adults 50 to 64 made up 15% of transmission, and children and teens accounted for just 6%. (paper)

Feb 8: Malaysia reports 24 daily deaths, an all-time high

Feb 9: South Africa suspends use of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine after a study shows that it does not protect against the South African variant (paper)

Feb 10: Japan reports 121 covid deaths in one day, an all-time high

Feb 11: Mexico reports a record 1,474 covid deaths in one day

Feb 12: The USA reports 5,467 covid deaths in 24 hours and Argentina passes 50,000 deaths

Feb 16: Mexico tops 175,000 deaths

Feb 16: Slovakia becomes the country with the most covid deaths per capita, replacing Portugal

Feb 18: More than 185.4 million vaccine doses have been administered worldwide, equal to 2.4 doses for every 100 people, but 10 countries have administered 75% of vaccinations (Israel has vaccinated 46.4% of its population, Britain 24%, the USA 12.1%, Switzerland 7.6%, Germany 3.5%) and 130 countries have not received a single dose of vaccine

Feb 22: The USA passes 500,000 covid deaths

Feb 24: California passes 50,000 covid deaths and Brazil passes 250,000

Feb 24: The world passes 2.5 million covid deaths, of which 520,000 in the USA, 251,000 in Brazil, 183,000 in Mexico, 157,000 in India, 122,000 in Britain, 97,000 in Italy, 86,000 in France, 85,000 in Russia, 70,000 in Germany, with the highest death rapes per capita still in Western Europe and the USA

Feb 26: China approves two more vaccines, one from CanSinoBIO and one from the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products

Feb 26: A study by Brazil's CADDE estimates that the P1 variant is 1.4-2.2 times more transmissible than previous strains (paper)

Feb 27: The USA authorizes a third vaccine, Johnson & Johnson's adenovirus-based vaccine

Mar 8, 2021: Italy's death toll passes 100,000

Mar 8: The CDC advises that fully vaccinated people can gather without facemasks

Mar 10: Brazil's daily death toll from covid passes 2,000 and the overall death toll passes 270,000

Mar 10: Britain's death toll passes 125,000

Mar 10: Czechia has the highest death toll per capita in the world, ahead of Belgium and Britain, and Hungary has a higher death toll per capita than Italy

Mar 11: Brazil is now leading in deaths with more than 2,000 while the USA reports 1,500, Mexico 650, Russia 500, Italy 380, Poland 350, France and Germany more than 200

Mar 12: The USA tops 100 million vaccine doses administered, and 13% of adults are now fully vaccinated

Mar 12: India reports a spike in new cases (23,000), signaling a new wave

Mar 14: Italy and Germany report a third wave of covid infections and introduce new lockdowns

Mar 14: Covid deaths in Britain fall below 100

Mar 16: China approves another vaccine, a protein subunit vaccine developed jointly by Anhui Zhifei Longcom Biopharmaceutical and the Chinese Academy of Science under the direction of Gao Fu

Mar 17: 50% of Israel's population is fully vaccinated, 13% of the US population is, and 3% of Britain is

Mar 18: Brazil reports 2,724 covid deaths, an all-time record

Mar 19: Brazil reports 2,815 covid deaths, an all-time record

Mar 19: Part of France locks down again

Mar 20: More than 45,000 people have died of covid in Brazil in the past month, the highest death toll in the world

Mar 20: Pakistan's prime minister Imran Khan tests positive for covid

Mar 20: Miami Beach declares a state of emergency (days after the governor of Florida boasted that Florida was open for business)

Mar 21: Peru and Poland pass 50,000 covid deaths

Mar 22: Covid cases rise again across most of the USA

Mar 24: Brazil passes 300,000 covid deaths

Mar 24: India detects a "double mutant", that has both E484Q and L452R mutations

Mar 25: The death rate in several Eastern European countries (Czechia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovenia) is now higher than Britain's and Italy's

Mar 26: Mexico passes 200,000 covid deaths

Mar 27: Brazil reports a record 2,543 covid deaths in one day and its death rate passes France's (1,454 deaths per million people)

Mar 27: Covid deaths in the USA fall below 1,000

Mar 29: Texas opens covid vaccinations to all adults

Mar 30: Brazil reports a record 3,780 covid deaths in one day

Apr 3, 2021: France enters its third national lockdown

Apr 6: Brazil reports a record 4,195 covid deaths in one day

Apr 6: A study by the University of Oxford finds that a third of covid-19 patients were diagnosed with a brain or psychiatric disorder within six months (paper)

Apr 7: The CDC announces that the British variant B117 has become the most common lineage circulating in the USA

Apr 8: The USA had fully vaccinated 19.6% of its population, compared with 8.5% in Britain and 2% in Canada

Apr 12: The WHO warns that the trajectory of the pandemic is growing exponentially after worldwide covid cases climb by 9% in one week and deaths jump 5%

Apr 15: India reports more than 200,000 new infections, a seventh daily record surge in the last eight days

Apr 16: France passes 100,000 covid deaths

Apr 17: The global death toll from covid-19 passes 3 million

Apr 20: The percentage of fully vaccinated people in Israel is 57%, in Chile 28.4%, in the USA 25%, in Britain 15%, in Italy 7.5% and in Germany 6.7%

Apr 21: As cases increase rapidly, India reports a record 2,023 covid deaths

Apr 22: California has lowest covid case rate in the continental USA (6 per 100,000 people) while Michigan has the highest (64 per 100,000)

Apr 22: About one million people have died of covid in Latin America, where the Brazilian P1 variant is rampant

Apr 22: India reports another record daily toll of 2,263 deaths

Apr 23: Brasil's death toll in one day is 2914, India's 2624, Argentina's 556, Mexico's 425, Italy's 342, Germany's 289, Spain's 95, Japan's 56, South Korea's 1, China's 0

Apr 23: India reports another record daily toll of 2,624 deaths

Apr 24: Hungary has the highest death rate in the world (2741 per million people), followed by other Eastern European countries (Czechia, Bulgaria, Slovakia), then Belgium (2060), Italy (1971), Britain (1808), Peru (1770) and USA (1759), while India (138), Japan (78), South Korea (35) and China (3) still have much lower death rates, and South Africa has the highest in Africa (903) and Lebanon the highest in the Arab world (1047)

Apr 25: Thailand reports its highest death toll since the beginning of the pandemic, 11 (148 deaths in just under 30 days)

Apr 25: Latin America accounts for 35% of all covid deaths in the world of the week, despite having just 8% of the world's population

Apr 25: South Korea reports only 4 deaths and Taiwan has had only 6 deaths in one year

Apr 26: California has the lowest seven-day rate of new covid cases in the USA (32.5 per 100,000 people compared with 114.7 nationwidei), followed by Hawaii (36.8)

Apr 27: India's official death toll passes 200,000

Apr 29: Turkey beings its first nationwide lockdown

Apr 29: Brazil passes 400,000 covid deaths

Apr 30: Covid hospitalizations in California drop to their lowest levels since the start of the pandemic

Apr 30: The World Health Organization finally admits that covid can spread via aerosols, not only via droplets, one year after the first evidence emerged

May 2, 2021: Weekly deaths from covid-19 in the USA fall to 4,819, the lowest weekly number since July

May 5: India reports 3,980 covid deaths in one day

May 7: A study by the University of Washington estimates the real death toll in the USA is 905,000 (the official one is 574,000 deaths), and the real death tolls are 654,000 in India, 617,000 in Mexico, 595,000 in Brazil, 593,000 in Russia and 209,000 in Britain (paper)

May 7: More than 110 million people are fully vaccinated (33% of the total population), and more than 150 million people are at least partially vaccinated, in the USA

May 7: The CDC of the USA finally admits that aerosols is the main way in which covid spreads

May 8: 25% of Britain's population is fully vaccinated and 9% of Germany's is

May 9: Only 246 covid deaths are reported in the USA, compared with 1024 in Brazil and 3779 in India, 328 in Russia, 146 in Poland, 139 in Italy, 64 in Japan, 57 in Mexico, 55 in Germany, 2 in Britain, 0 in Sweden

May 11: Germany passes 85,000 covid deaths

May 12: Almost 400 people die in one day in Argentina, one of the worst days since the beginning of the pandemic

May 13: The CDC of the USA removes the facemask recommendation for vaccinated people

May 15: The 7 countries with the highest covid death rate are all in Eastern Europe

May 16: The USA passes 600,000 covid deaths

May 18: India records 4,329 covid deaths in one day, the pandemic's highest daily death toll in any country yet

May 19: Brazil reaches Italy's death rate (more than 2,000 deaths per million people), the highest outside of Europe

May 19: New York reopens after 14 months

May 23: India passes 300,000 covid deaths (but many may have not been counted)

May 24: Brazil passes 450,000 covid deaths (and many may have not been counted)

May 28: Vietnam discovers a new hybrid variant and begins mass testing

May 30: Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay have the highest fatality rates per person in the world for the week

May 31: Peru more than doubles its covid death toll to 180,000, making it the country with the highest death rate per capita, and fifth after USA (610,000), Brazil (466,000), India (335,000) and Mexico (224,000) in total number of deaths

May 31: Europe sees a steep decline in new covid infections and deaths during the last week of May

Jun 1, 2021: Malaysia begins a lockdown

Jun 1: In Nepal, 40% of covid tests return positive

Jun 3: Thailand, which had mostly zero daily deaths between 29 April 2020 and 16 April 2021, reports 39 covid deaths in one day, its highest daily toll yet

Jun 14: The covid death toll of the USA passes 600,000

Jun 17: The Delta variant (B.1.617.2) accounts for 90% of infections in Britain

Jun 18: A phylogenetic analysis by Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center implies that covid was already spreading in Wuhan before December 2019 (paper)

Jun 19: Brazil's covid death toll passes 500,000

Jun 24: Russia's announces over 20,000 new daily cases

Jun 28: A study by Washington University shows that the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna may protect against covid for years (paper)

Jun 29: Russia reports 643 covid deaths, an all-time high

Jun 30: Half of Australia's population is in lockdowns due to the Delta variant

Jun 30: The USA reports 256 covid deaths, the lowest number since March 2020

Jun 30: Bangladesh records its highest-ever daily case count

Jul 1, 2021: Bangladesh begins a nationwide lockdown

Jul 1: Hong Kong bans all incoming flights from Britain over concerns for the Delta variant

Jul 1: Indonesia announces lockdown in Java and Bali

Jul 1: The EU introduces a vaccine passport

Jul 1: Israel reports its highest daily infection rate in three months

Jul 1: Russia reports an all-time high of 672 daily covid deaths

Jul 1: Britain reports 27,989 new cases in a day, the highest number since January

Jul 1: Portugal reports the biggest increase in cases since February

Jul 1: 3,954,820 people have died of covid in the world (but probably many more), of which 7,800 over the last 24 hours

Jul 1: The countries with the highest daily covid infections are Brazil (+65,163), India (+46,617), Colombia (+28,315), Britain (+27,646), Russia (+23,128), Argentina (+21,177), Indonesia (+24,836), South Africa (+21,584), Iran (+14,303) and USA (+13,348)

Jul 2: South Korea 826 daily infections, the highest number in six months

Jul 2: India logs 400,000 covid deaths

Jul 4: Russia reports more than 25 thousand new infections in a day and 663 deaths

Jul 8: The global death toll from covid-19 passes 4 million

Jul 13: Russia reports 767 covid deaths in one day, an all-time high

Jul 14: Argentina passes 100,000 covid deaths (USA 623,000; Brazil 535,000; India 412,000; Mexico 236,000; Peru 194,000, with the highest per-capita death toll; Russia 145,000; Britain 129,000; Italy 128,000; Colombia 114,000; France 112,000)

Jul 16: Indonesia reports more than 56,000 new covid cases, a single-day national record, more than Brazil (+52,789), Britain (+48,641), India (+38,949), USA (+28,412), Spain (+27,688), Russia (+24,793), Iran (+23,655), Argentina (+17,295), South Africa (+16,435)

Jul 17: Florida accounts for 20% of all new covid infections in the USA

Jul 19: A report published by Arvind Subramanian estimates that up to 4 million Indians may have died of covid (ten times more than the official number)

Jul 21: Indonesia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Cambodia and Thailand (that were spared the covid pandemic in 2020) report seven-day averages of 4.37, 4.29, 4.14, 1.55 and 1.38, respectively. per million

Jul 21: Malaysia reports an all-time high of 199 daily covid deaths, Myanmar 247, and Thailand 108 (before April 22 never had more than 5 covid deaths per day)

Jul 21: Brazil reports 1,424 daily covid deaths, Russia 772, the USA 397, Britain 73, Germany 43, France 22, Italy 21, Spain 18

Jul 22: Indonesia reports an all-time high of 1,449 daily covid deaths

Jul 22: Florida, Texas and Missouri account for 40% of all new infections in the USA, 25% are in Florida alone

See also:
Covid-19: An introduction and summary
The evolution of the pandemic in numbers
The Bizarre Adventures of the Surgical Mask
One virus or two?
Data and Recommended Articles
The Clown & the Virus: A Timeline of Trump's virus
The Clown & the Virus - Part 2
Trump's Virus,
Covid-19: How it may change the World
Sinophobia & Covid-19 .
Sinophobia & Covid-19 in US Media .
TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news

World News | History | Editor
(Copyright © 1999-2020 Piero Scaruffi)