Covid-19 Pandemic Week-By-Week
It feels like the winter of our covidiscontent has lasted for years, and the date of each new emergency has already become hazy. Therefore I created a chart (see below for image and link to original file) to keep track.
Each line in the chart represents a single week (Mon-Sun), columns represent 4 categories of events, and the font color of each event tells the event’s location. I try to keep all the weeks the same height in order to not distort lengths of time, though there are some exceptions. Color key and sources are at the bottom. The internet contains several timelines and summaries but I have not found any as concise and clear as this.
It happens that the first public announcement of the disease occurred just before Winter Week 1 of the Heptal Calendar, so in each row I list the Heptal week along with the Gregorian date of the week’s beginning.
The chart shows how quickly events unfolded. Four weeks after the first Chinese TV report of a “new viral outbreak” in the city of Wuhan, the disease was found outside of Hubei province, and by week 6 after the announcement had spread to much of East Asia and North America. It hit Europe by the next week; interestingly it was not found in other hot spots till later: Iran in week 10 and New York week 11.
The response was also fast, though not fast enough in many places. China initially did little to slow the spead, with Wuhan holding a banquet for 40,000 families on week 5, but in the following weeks quarantines were imposed first on Wuhan and then on larger areas of China; airlines and countries created barriers to international travel from weeks 7 to 13, and various degrees of physical separation were imposed in Italy (week 10), the US (starting week 13), and elsewhere.
Medical action largely failed to contain the disease, but the speed of response was remarkable by historical standards. Germany and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced tests by week 5, and South Korea started testing after announcing a test in week 9. However the US slowness (compared to other countries) in implementing testing was a cause for much recrimination; by week 13, South Korea had tested hundreds of thousands of people while US labs were just gearing up for large-scale testing.
In the US, the pandemic really hit home in spring (green rows in the chart), with schools switching to distance learning, governors ordering varying degrees of lockdown, and the federal government passing increasingly large spending bills to deal with the economic implosion caused by the lockdowns.
The quotations from the US president illustrate how the gravity of the situation slowly dawned on segments of US society, with early efforts to dismiss the risk giving way to portraying the possible deaths of “only” 200,000 Americans as a victory compared to even larger possible. death tolls