On the last day of 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) took notice of report on the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission's website that there was a cluster of 'viral pneumonia' cases in the city. And on the first day of the new year, WHO started investigating how serious the matter was.
On January 9, 2020, WHO announced that the outbreak in Wuhan was caused by a novel coronavirus. The organization reiterated the measures that should be taken when controlling a new virus, but on January 13, the first case outside China was confirmed. Two months later, on March 11, 2020, COVID-19 was characterized as a pandemic.
It was a scary time, dealing with a new disease which spread around the world in such a short time. When countries started to announce lockdowns, at first it sounded kind of fun, staying home, having more time to fix our leaking sink or baking banana bread. We probably didn't let ourselves think that originally a two-week lockdown would be extended this much.
We didn't know what was in the future, so some of the first tweets about it sound so out of touch in today's context. Nevertheless, some of them are actually funny and to be fair, we still joke about COVID-19, even when we have seen what a serious disease it is, because what else is left there to do?
Most of these tweets are more light-hearted than those we see now, but there were people who caught on from the very beginning that we should be careful and not think about this new virus as just another simple flu.
We're already reminiscing about the time when the virus broke out, but we still have a way to go in stopping it and returning to normal life. Hopefully, after another year, we will be looking at the tweets people are posting at this moment and we will take a breath of relief that it is all over.
