Pandemic Atlas: How COVID-19 Took the World in 2020

Almost no place, nor anyone, has been saved.

The virus that first emerged a year ago in Wuhan, China, spread around the world in 2020, wreaking havoc in its wake. More than any event in memory, the pandemic has been a global event. On every continent, households have felt its devastation: unemployment and confinement, illness and death. And a constant and relentless fear.

But each nation has its own story on how it coped. China used its authoritarian muscle to annihilate the new coronavirus. Brazil suffered from the pandemic while its president mocked it. Israel’s ultra-Orthodox violated measures to prevent the spread of the disease and widened the gap between themselves and their more secular neighbors.

Spain witnessed the death of thousands of its elders. Kenyans watched as schools closed and children went to work, some in prostitution. India’s draconian confinement lowered the infection rate, but only temporarily and at terrible cost.

At the end of the year, vaccines offer a ray of hope amid a growing second wave of infections.

“The summer will be difficult, four long and difficult months,” said Chancellor Angela Merkel, when she announced new restrictions on life in Germany. “But it will end.”

Associated Press journalists around the world analyzed how the countries from which they report have weathered the pandemic – and where they are when the second year of infections is about to begin.

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The story of COVID-19 in BRAZIL is the story of a president who insists that the pandemic is no big deal. Jair Bolsonaro decried any quarantine, saying the closures would ruin the economy and punish the poor. He scoffed at the “little flu,” and then made the fatalistic claim that nothing could prevent 70% of Brazilians from getting sick. And he refused to take responsibility when many did. It did inject money into the economy to ease the pain of the pandemic. And while Bolsonaro may have inspired people to take shelter, he instead encouraged them to disobey local restrictions.

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Workers have returned to factories and offices, students are back in classrooms, and once again long lines form outside popular restaurants. In cities, wearing a surgical mask has become a habit – although it is no longer required outside of the subway and other crowded places. In many ways, normal life has resumed in CHINA, the country where COVID-19 first appeared a year ago. The ruling Communist Party of China has rolled back some of the most radical disease controls ever imposed. The challenge is employment: the economy is growing again, but the recovery is uneven.

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The GERMANS enjoyed a fairly relaxed summer with many restrictions lifted, the dividend of a quick response to the initial outbreak, and a confidence in testing early and aggressively that earned it wide praise. That reduced the number of daily COVID-19 cases from a peak of more than 6,000 at the end of March, to a few hundred by the warmer months. But when people became lax to follow the rules, the numbers began to rise to nearly four times the daily record in March, and now the country finds itself in a new lockdown as it tries to get the pandemic back under control.

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INDIA, a nation of 1.3 billion people, will likely emerge as the country with the highest number of the new coronavirus in the world. It responded to the pandemic early on with abrupt national lockdown, but the number of cases skyrocketed as restrictions were relaxed and its fragile public health system struggled to keep up. Questions have been raised about its unusually low death rate. India’s concerns about the virus are multiplied by its struggling economy, which posted its worst performance in at least two decades. It will be the hardest hit among the world’s major economies, even after the pandemic subsides.

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At first, IRANIAN officials downplayed COVID-19: They denied the growing number of infections, refused to close mosques, took half-measures to close businesses. That was then. But now even the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wore disposable gloves when he planted a tree in front of state media, and prayed in an empty mosque for the start of the holy Shiite commemoration of Ashura. The novel coronavirus pandemic has only gotten worse in Iran over the course of the year, threatening everyone from the day laborer on the street to the highest levels in the Islamic Republic. Now, the virus has sickened and killed top officials, and has become perhaps Iran’s greatest threat since the turmoil and war that followed the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

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When ISRAEL entered its second national lockdown for the novel coronavirus in September, most of the country quickly complied with the lockdown. But in some ultra-Orthodox areas, synagogues were packed, mourners thronged funerals, and COVID-19 cases continued to rise. Failure to comply with national security rules in ultra-Orthodox areas reinforced the popular perception that the community prioritizes faith over science and cares little for the common good. It has also sparked a backlash that threatens to spread throughout Israeli society for years. Meanwhile, neighboring Palestinian territories – the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – face their own crises.

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In late February, ITALY became the epicenter of COVID-19 in Europe and a warning of what happens when a health system collapses under the weight of the sick and dead from the pandemic, even in one of the most rich in the world. When a second wave struck in September, even the lessons learned from the first were not enough to save Italy’s disproportionately elderly population. Despite the plans and protocols, monitoring systems and machinery that were put in place to protect against the expected fall onslaught, thousands more died and hospitals were once again pushed to the limit.

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The COVID-19 pandemic in JAPAN got off to a turbulent start in February when a luxury cruise ship returned to its home port near Tokyo with passengers and crew; their infections detonated during the quarantine. The handling of the Diamond Princess sparked criticism that Japanese health officials got it wrong and turned the ship into an incubator for viruses. Despite concerns about whether the country could survive future waves of infections, Japan has shaken off the dangerous increases seen in the United States and Europe, and now hopes to host the Olympics next summer. Experts say that the use of face masks and controlling its borders have been the key to keeping the number of Japanese cases low.

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They say that youth is a factor that protects against COVID-19. In KENYA, the youth have suffered anyway. From children forced to perform hard work and prostitution, to schools closed until 2021; from a child killed when police fired for a curfew, to babies born in desperate conditions. The effects of the pandemic in Kenya have hit young people hard. Growing economic pressures and Kenya’s intention to close schools for almost everyone until 2021 have put enormous pressure on children, who were suddenly left adrift by the millions. Some now break rocks in quarries or have turned to prostitution and robbery.

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For months, PERU held the grim title of being the first in the world in deaths per capita from COVID-19. It didn’t have to be this way. Decades of underinvestment in public health, poor decisions early in the pandemic, along with severe inequality, and a shortage of life-saving goods like medical oxygen, combined to create one of the deadliest outbreaks in the world. Now the nation grapples with massive and crippling pain. A recent survey found that seven out of 10 Peruvians know someone who has died from the virus.

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In the world’s most unequal country, the disease hit the poor hardest and the economic recession pushed unemployment to 42%. But SOUTH AFRICA had a secret weapon: hundreds of professionals who are veterans of long-running battles against HIV / AIDS and drug-resistant tuberculosis. The country’s leaders heeded his advice on how to handle the new coronavirus, and while there have been ups and downs, worst-case scenarios have not occurred.

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In 2020, the SPANIARDS have normalized things unthinkable only 12 months before. But 2020 will also become the year when an unknown virus shook the foundations of the social contract and exposed a system that failed to prevent so many deaths. Politicians presume that the system did not collapse during that first wave, when the country recorded 929 deaths in a single day. But healthcare professionals will tell you that the current cost was a workforce so overworked that it sickened more than anywhere else in the world and suffered enormous emotional toll.

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The Americans have been inundated by wave after wave of dismal numbers – COVID-19 deaths in the hundreds of thousands, infections in the millions. While those numbers bear witness to a tragedy of historic proportions, they do not quite capture the multitude of ways, large and small, in which the virus has disrupted and readjusted everyday life. For that, however, there are a number of other figures, some more familiar than others, but all equally revealing, to trace the widespread impact of the pandemic.

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In MEXICO, the government did little beyond asking its people to act responsibly. The result: more than 100,000 deaths, a figure that is presumed to be an underestimate. In NEW ZEALAND, the government closed its borders and almost everything, preventing all but a couple of dozen deaths. The nations of the world spanned the entire spectrum in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, sometimes moving from strict to lax measures or vice versa over the course of a few months. A look at the state of the pandemic around the world.

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