The year 2020 — marked by heartache, loneliness, helplessness, but also signs of kindness when we least expect it, and now, glimmers of hope.
December 2019 is when the world changed, the first case of the coronavirus was detected in what would soon be known as the origin of the pandemic: Wuhan, China.
“If the virus turns out to be readily transmissible from human to human, then we’ll have a much larger problem,” Dr. William Schaffner, Infectious Disease Specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said.
With the start of 2020 came the first U.S. case in Washington State, and by the end of January, COVID-19 was declared a public health emergency. At this time locally, it seemed like a distant issue.
Though on February 1, Massachusetts declared its first case, and on March 1, Rhode Island announced its first.