WP Slate | What Newspapers Can Teach Us About Web Design

The novel coronavirus belongs to the same family of viruses that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). COVID-19, as the disease is known, produces mild symptoms in most people, but can also lead to severe respiratory illness.

But compared to SARS and MERS, COVID-19 has spread strikingly fast: While MERS took two and a half years to infect 1,000 people, and SARS took roughly four months to hit that figure, COVID-19 reached 1,000 cases in just 48 days.

On March 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, underscoring the speed and tenacity with which the virus had spread.