One year later, the majority of the world’s 7.8 billion people is struggling with the pandemic, relying on face masks, gloves, sanitisers, and social distancing – things that have become defining elements of the “new normal”.
Despite several countries in the world, including the US, UK, Russia, and India, among others, having gone into months of hibernation against the virus since the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 has killed over 1.33 million people around the world, according to the real time statistics platform Worldometer.com.
On Tuesday, netizens from around the world took to Twitter to mark the “birthday” of the contagious and deadly virus – which is known to attack the respiratory systems of humans and triggers fever as well as breathlessness, while negatively impacting the senses of taste and smell.
Marking one year since the outbreak of the virus, citizens around the world are just praying for this “nightmare” to end already. Everybody just wants to hug their loved ones without having to fear passing on or contracting the deadly virus, celebrate festivals, and return to their busy work lives.
Between 17 November and mid-December 2019, the Chinese health authorities identified 266 cases of this common cold-like infection, only to realise by late December that they were actually dealing with an all-new disease.
There are multiple conspiracy theories that have surfaced online over the last year attempting to explain the birth of the coronavirus.
The first patient with COVID-19 reportedly contracted the virus after he consumed a bat purchased at an exotic meat market in China’s Wuhan. Denying claims that the virus had originated in Wuhan, earlier this year China raised suspicious fingers towards US troops, some of whom were reportedly in Wuhan at the time of the outbreak.
In October 2020, a Chinese virologist named Li-Meng Yan created sent shockwaves in the conspiracy world, saying that the virus had actually been actually created in a government-regulated lab in Wuhan. Yan’s statement gave wind to speculations that spreading the coronavirus around the world was China’s bio-war tactic. China denied all of Yan’s claims.
While there are no clear explanations that determine how the virus really went on to become a pandemic killing people and crippling the global economy, the world is still waiting for a cure for this fatal flu.
Health experts from around the world are trying to devise a safe vaccine against the virus without leaving many side effects.