COVID — short for COVID-19, coronavirus disease 2019 — is the infectious respiratory disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, first identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019.
The 📝World Health Organization (WHO) announced the name on February 11, 2020, built from "corona," "virus," "disease," and the year of the first reported cases. The disease spreads mainly through respiratory droplets and aerosols, and its course ranges from no symptoms to fever, cough, loss of taste or smell, severe pneumonia, and death; some people report symptoms lasting months, known as long COVID.
The outbreak became the 📝COVID-19 pandemic: the WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern on January 30, 2020, characterized the spread as a pandemic on March 11, 2020, and ended the emergency declaration on May 5, 2023. Vaccines were authorized from December 2020 and sharply reduced severe illness and death, while new variants continued to emerge. The WHO counts more than seven million reported deaths, and excess-mortality estimates run considerably higher.
During the first years of the pandemic, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington published widely cited projections of infections, hospital demand, and deaths. IHME stopped updating those models after December 16, 2022, so the site now serves as a historical record rather than a live forecast.
When COVID arrived in 2020 we treated the crisis as a catalyst for creativity: we catalogued pandemic-era domains in 📝Pandemic Prospecting, moved our gatherings into virtual space, and wrote 📝COVID = Crowning to read the moment as a birth.