November 17 – Nearly six years ago, on 31 December 2019, the World Health Organisation’s Country Office in China picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website on cases of ‘viral pneumonia’ in Wuhan, China. In the weeks, months and years that unfolded after that, COVID-19 came to shape our lives and our world.

Now British scientists have identified who was likely ‘Patient Zero’, the very first case of COVID, a 55-year-old individual from Hubei province in China, who was hospitalised weeks earlier, on November 17, 2019.

At the time, authorities suspected the virus stemmed from something sold at a wet market in the city of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province. However, it’s now believed that the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, originated in a bat and somehow hopped to another animal, possibly a pangolin, which then passed it on to humans. The disease then spread between people rapidly without any animal intermediary.

The first confirmed case in Europe was in Spain on January 12, 2020. In the European Union, the official death toll has reached 1,269,025, whilst in Greece, official figures put the number of deaths from the Coronavirus at 40,108.

The rest, sadly, is history.