2020 was the first year of the COVID-19 outbreak and it caused more than 1.8 million deaths around the world. Each nation had its own story of how it dealt with the spread of the coronavirus. Let’s see what happened in several countries in 2020.
China
In China, workers have returned to factories and offices, students are back in the classroom and people are eating together at restaurants. In the cities, wearing a face mask is not required outside of subways and other crowded places. Life is back to normal in China.
Germany
Germans took widespread testing for the coronavirus, which won wide praise. It brought the number of daily COVID-19 cases down from a high of more than 6,000 in late March to the few hundreds by the warmer months. But people stopped following the rules all the time, so the numbers began to climb to nearly four times the March daily record. Germany is now in a new lockdown as it tries to bring the coronavirus back under control.
India
A nation of 1.3 billion people, India is likely to become the country with the world’s highest coronavirus numbers. It set up a nationwide lockdown early on. But the number of cases went up quickly as many people stopped following the rules strictly.
Italy
In February, Italy became the center of COVID-19 cases in Europe. The lessons of that earlier wave did not help the much older population of the country in September. The number of COVID-19 rose again and many of those patients were older people. Hospitals once again were almost at a breaking point.