How COVID changed life as we knew it in a matter of weeks | WORLD

On January 1, 2020, when the world welcoming a new year, the Chinese authorities closed a seafood market in the city of Wuhan, of 11 million inhabitants, on suspicion that an outbreak of a new “viral pneumonia” affecting 27 people could be related to the place.

The first laboratory tests in China they targeted a new coronavirus. By January 20, the disease had spread to three countries.

For most people, at that time the disease was something that developed thousands of miles away, but almost a year later, COVID-19 has changed lives in unexpected ways.

Almost everyone has been affected, whether it be by the disease itself, the loss of loved ones or jobs, confinements at home, and new ways of working, relaxing and interacting.

Nearly 1.5 million people have died worldwide from the disease, and about 63 million people have been infected.

After the initial “wave” of the pandemic was under some semblance of control in many countries, nations now face a second and third wave, even larger than the first, imposing new restrictions on everyday life.

Among the most disturbing images to emerge from the pandemic are those of doctors on the front lines of the battle against the virus.

At the San Raffaele hospital in Milan, seven members of the intensive care unit staff caring for an 18-year-old patient suffering from COVID-19They pushed the bed into the living room, holding medical equipment and monitors.

Doctors and nurses like them, wrapped in protective gear – gowns, gloves, masks and visors – have become a familiar sight. Also health workers who collapse from exhaustion or pain from losing colleagues due to illness.

In March and April, many countries began imposing lockdowns and social distancing to slow the spread of the highly contagious virus.

The effects of the disease were at times staggering. Birdsong could be heard like never before in densely populated cities and wild animals ventured into unusually empty cities.

At the often crowded Golden Gate Bridge View Vista Point across from San Francisco, a coyote was pacing on the side of the road.

Even the streets of Manhattan were eerily empty. Ballet dancer Ashlee Montague donned a gas mask and danced in the middle of Times Square in New York.

In Brasilia, the Catholic priest Jonathan Costa prayed alone in the Santuario Dom Bosco church, among photographs of the faithful taped to the pews.

Wearing masks to combat the spread of the virus also became common throughout the world.

At Tokyo’s Shinagawa train station, crowds of commuters wore masks, as did prisoners huddled in a cell in the Quezaltepeque prison, El Salvador.

In private homes, families learned to live together 24 hours a day and to entertain and teach their children.

The pandemic hit some of the world’s poorest people hardest, exposing inequalities in access to medical treatment and government funding to compensate those who lost their livelihoods.

In May in South Africa, in the Itireleng settlement in Pretoria, people waited in a line that stretched as far as the eye could see for food aid.

As 2020 draws to a close, vaccines are on the horizon, raising hope that some aspects of life will return to how we knew them.

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