It was in January that the first known case of the new coronavirus, still unnamed, appeared in the United States.S. in Washington state. We published an explainer in what is the coronavirus and if you should worry. At the time, news coverage seemed to be taking sides: either “everyone panics!” or “meh, it’s nothing.” The public health experts I follow were taking a different approach, looking cautiously and saying “don’t worry, still. “
We encourage readers to use your nervous energy to get a flu shot, correctly observing (in retrospect) that the less flu is circulating, the better for all of us, regardless of whether there is a pandemic or not. We also incorrectly predicted that there would likely be more deaths from influenza than from coronavirus by the end of the year.
We also talked about the Johns Hopkins tracker, and our screenshot at the end of the month reported 2,886 confirmed cases. The same website is still useful today, but the global case count is over 82 million.