Biology
Investigatory Project
Name - shreya Tiwari
Std- 12th science
subject- Biology
School- Ananya vidhyalaya
Topic- COVID-19 history, current situation statistics
of latest updates
Acknowledgment
I would like to express my
special thanks of gratitude to
my biology teacher, Ms.
Vaishnavi ma'am as well as
Principal ma'am who give me
the opportunity to do this
wonderful project on the topic
"COVID-19 history, current
situation, statistics of latest
updates"
Introduction
The outbreak of the infectious respiratory disease
known as COVID-19 triggered one of the deadliest
pandemics in modern history. COVID-19 claimed nearly
7 million lives worldwide. In the United States, deaths
from COVID-19 exceeded 1.1 million, nearly twice the
American death toll from the 1918 flu pandemic. The
COVID-19 pandemic also took a heavy toll
economically, politically and psychologically, revealing
deep divisions in the way that Americans viewed the
role of government in a public health crisis, particularly
vaccine mandates. While the United States downgraded
its “national emergency” status over the pandemic on
May 11, 2023, the full effects of the COVID-19 pandemic
will reverberate for decades.
History of COVID-19
A new virus breaks out in Wuhan,
china
In December 2019, the China office of the World Health
Organization (WHO) received news of an isolated
outbreak of a pneumonia-like virus in the city of Wuhan.
The virus caused high fevers and shortness of breath,
and the cases seemed connected to the Huanan
Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, which was closed
by an emergency order on January 1, 2020.
After testing samples of the unknown virus, the WHO
identified it as a novel type of coronavirus similar to the
deadly SARS virus that swept through Asia from 2002-
2004. The WHO named this new strain SARS-CoV-2
(Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2).
The first Chinese victim of SARS-CoV-2 died on January
11, 2020.
Where, exactly, the novel virus originated has been
hotly debated. There are two leading theories. One is
that the virus jumped from animals to humans, possibly
carried by infected animals sold at the Wuhan market in
late 2019. A second theory claims the virus escaped
from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research lab
that was studying coronaviruses. U.S. intelligence
agencies maintain that both origin stories are
“plausible.”
The first COVID-19 case in America
The WHO hoped that the virus outbreak would be
contained to Wuhan, but by mid-January 2020,
infections were reported in Thailand, Japan and Korea,
all from people who had traveled to China.
On January 18, 2020, a 35-year-old man checked into an
urgent care center near Seattle, Washington. He had
just returned from Wuhan and was experiencing a fever,
nausea and vomiting. On January 21, he was identified
as the first American infected with SARS-CoV-2.
In reality, dozens of Americans had contracted SARS-
CoV-2 weeks earlier, but doctors didn’t think to test for
a new type of virus. One of those unknowingly infected
patients died on February 6, 2020, but her death wasn’t
confirmed as the first American casualty until April 21.
On February 11, 2020, the WHO released a new name
for the disease causing the deadly outbreak:
Coronavirus Disease 2019 or COVID-19. By mid-March
2020, all 50 U.S. states had reported at least one
positive case of COVID-19, and nearly all of the new
infections were caused by “community spread,” not by
people who contracted the disease while traveling
abroad.
At the same time, COVID-19 had spread to 114 countries
worldwide, killing more than 4,000 people and infecting
hundreds of thousands more. On March 11, the WHO
made it official and declared COVID-19 a pandemic.
The world shuts down
Pandemics are expected in a globally
interconnected world, so emergency plans
were in place. In the United States, health
officials at the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) and the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) set in motion a
national response plan developed for flu
pandemics.
State by state and city by city, government
officials took emergency measures to
encourage “social distancing,” one of the
many new terms that became part of the
COVID-19 vocabulary. Travel was
restricted. Schools and churches were
closed. With the exception of “essential
workers,” all offices and businesses were
shuttered. By early April 2020, more than
316 million Americans were under a shelter-
in-place or stay-at-home order.
With more than 1,000 deaths and nearly
100,000 cases, it was clear by April 2020
that COVID-19 was highly contagious and
virulent. What wasn’t clear, even to public
health officials, was how individuals could
best protect themselves from COVID-19.
In the early weeks of the outbreak, the
CDC discouraged people from buying face
masks, because officials feared a shortage
of masks for doctors and hospital workers.
By April 2020, the CDC revised its
recommendations, encouraging people to
wear masks in public, to socially distance
and to wash hands frequently. President
Donald Trump undercut the CDC
recommendations by emphasizing that
masking was voluntary and vowing not to
wear a mask himself. This was just the
beginning of the political divisions that
hobbled the COVID-19 response in
America.
Global financial markets collapse
In the early months of the COVID-19
pandemic, with billions of people
worldwide out of work, stuck at home, and
fretting over shortages of essential items
like toilet paper, global financial markets
went into a tailspin.
In the United States, share prices on the
New York Stock Exchange plummeted so
quickly that the exchange had to shut
down trading three separate times. The
Dow Jones Industrial Average eventually
lost 37 percent of its value, and the S&P
500 was down 34 percent.
Business closures and stay-at-home orders
gutted the U.S. economy. The
unemployment rate skyrocketed,
particularly in the service sector
(restaurant and other retail workers). By
May 2020, the U.S. unemployment rate
reached 14.7 percent, the highest jobless
rate since the Great Depression.
All across America, households felt the
pinch of lost jobs and lower wages.
Food insecurity reached a peak by
December 2020 with 30 million
American adults—a full 14 percent—
reporting that their families didn’t get
enough to eat in the past week.
The economic effects of the COVID-19
pandemic, like its health effects,
weren’t experienced equally. Black,
Hispanic and Native Americans
suffered from unemployment and food
insecurity at significantly higher rates
than white Americans.
Congress tried to avoid a complete
economic collapse by authorizing a
series of COVID-19 relief packages in
2020 and 2021, which included direct
stimulus checks for all American
families.
