Three years later and with seven million deaths, WHO lifts international emergency by the coronavirus pandemic. The World Health Organization decreed the alert on January 30, 2020 and since then the world has added more than 765 million infected and at least seven million deaths. However, it is believed that they could to 20 million due to excess mortality in that period.

The Johns Hopkins University in the United States estimates that the pandemic has caused 6.8 million deaths worldwide and some 676 million cases, although the WHO has published its own calculations that put the death toll closer to 20 million. triple what is shown in their own statistics until now.

The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019 and in January 2020 it spread throughout China. At the end of January of that year and throughout February outbreaks emerged in other countries like South Korea, Iran, Italy, Germany or Spain, and the virus spread throughout the world.

The rapid spread of the disease led the WHO to declare it a health emergency of international concern on January 30, 2020, based on the impact that the virus was having in underdeveloped countries with less health infrastructure.

In March 2020, cases were recorded on all continents, which led the WHO to declare, on the 11th, global pandemic. In the case of Europe, Italy and Spain were the first countries to report infections, followed by France, Germany or the United Kingdom, and the latter has been the one that has reported the most deaths with 220,721, according to Johns Hopkins University in USA.

USA He also reported his first infections in January 2020 and it has been one of the countries hardest hit by the virus with more than 1,123,836 deaths, according to the same source.

India, where the delta variant has spread virulently and where 530,779 dead, was the third country in the world in number of positives behind the United States and Brazil, the most affected nation in Latin America with 699,310 deaths. In Africa the spread of the coronavirus accelerated and the most affected country was South Africa, with more than 100,000 deaths, in which the omicron variant acted quickly.

restrictive measures

To prevent infections, governments imposed strict measures never implemented In numerous countries, travel restrictions, quarantines, confinements, social isolation, the cancellation of events and the closure of establishments and the minimization of social life followed one another. With all this, the pandemic had devastating socioeconomic effects, both in the societies of the developed world, with notable drops in GDP, and in the most disadvantaged ones.

Fear of food shortages even led to panic buying. Despite the flow of information, fear seized the population and misinformation proliferated.

the vaccines arrive

In the Western world, the US pharmaceutical company Pfizer/BioNTech was the first to synthesize a vaccinewhich began to be inoculated in the US on December 14, 2020, followed by the United Kingdom and later the EU, to gradually expand to other countries.

This was followed by those of the Moderna, AstraZeneca, Janssen, Novavax, Sanofi and GSK laboratories, being the last to arrive that of the Spanish multinational Hipra. Russia provided the Sputnik-V vaccine in August 2020, which was presented by President Vladimir Putin, and China also joined in with the Sinopharm (from Sinovac Biotech) and RDB vaccines, known for their low cost.

India also put its Covaxin vaccine on the market. Little by little, vaccination allowed the remission of infections and the de-escalation measures led to the relaxation of restrictions and the arrival of normality.