The COVID-19 pandemic

Date

11 March 2020

Category

Social & demographic

Region

Global

Era

Contemporary

Significance

The COVID-19 pandemic was the deadliest global disease outbreak in a century, killing an estimated seven million or more people and upending economies, health systems, and daily life worldwide.

First identified in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 spread across the globe within months, and on 11 March 2020 the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic. Governments imposed unprecedented lockdowns that halted travel, shuttered schools and businesses, and confined billions to their homes, triggering the sharpest global economic contraction since the Great Depression. Overwhelmed hospitals and daily death tolls became defining images of 2020 and 2021, while successive variants including the highly transmissible Omicron drove repeated waves. The pandemic accelerated remote work, reshaped supply chains, exposed deep health inequalities, and spurred the fastest vaccine development in history. Its social, economic, and political aftershocks, from inflation to institutional distrust, rippled through the world for years, making it the most consequential global event of the early twenty-first century.

Related social & demographic events

• The AIDS Epidemic Is First Identified
  1981
• George Floyd's murder and global Black Lives Matter protests
  May–June 2020
• The #MeToo movement goes viral
  October 2017 onward
• The Great Leap Forward and the Great Chinese Famine
  1958–1962
• Obergefell v. Hodges legalises same-sex marriage across the US
  26 June 2015
• The European migrant and refugee crisis
  2015

Further reading

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The wider story

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Global best-seller on how our species, its populations and societies remade the world.

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