while there were ominous whisperings of a new virus taking hold in china at the end of 2019, january 2020 was when healthing posted one its first stories about the deadly virus we would come to know as covid-19, after the united states reported its first case.
looking back over the last year, it’s both interesting and shocking to track the virus bringing the world to its knees with so much fear, mayhem and death. and although each month brought with it more sickness and more questions, covid-19 was also a catalyst to start a dialogue about issues we have long been putting band-aids upon band-aids on: the inhumane, shoddy treatment of residents in long-term care homes, our poorly equipped healthcare facilities, health inequities in marginalized communities and the crisis that is mental health care. it’s been one hell of a year, and we have been through a lot — but we have come a long way.
january 2020
writer jordan heuvelmans starts our covid-19 coverage with a look at
what we know about the mystery illness
, which, at the time, was not much: health officials were reporting the risk of contracting the virus — initially known as the “wuhan virus” and “2019-ncov” —
as low.
they knew it belonged to a larger family of coronaviruses that mostly infected animals, including bats, and that at the time, the rates of death were lower than sars.