The COVID-19 pandemic, also called the coronavirus pandemic, is a current pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). It is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The outbreak started in Wuhan, Hubei, China, in December 2019. The World Health Organization (WHO) called it a pandemic on 11 March 2020. The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses gave the virus its name. As of February 19, 2021, more than 110 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported in more than 188 countries and territories. More than two million people have died of COVID-19, and more than 85 million people have defeated, or recovered from the disease. The virus usually moves from one person to another with small drops made when coughing or sneezing. It mostly spreads when people are close to each other, which is why social distancing is encouraged. Coronavirus can also spread when people touch a surface with the virus, and then they touch their face. Common symptoms include fever, cough, and trouble breathing. The illness can worsen with pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome. As of January 2021, a number of vaccines for COVID-19 have been developed, but only a few have been approved as safe for use. The first vaccine to be approved was created by Pfizer and BioNTech, followed by the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine. Vaccine distribution has begun in many countries in Europe, North America, South America and Asia. The United Kingdom was the first western country to administer a COVID-19 vaccine. No antiviral medicine for COVID-19 is available. Doctors usually give patients supportive therapy instead. People can avoid spreading the virus by regularly washing their hands, covering their mouth when coughing, maintaining distance from other people, staying away from crowds, wearing medical or cloth face coverings, and being alone for people who think they are infected, also known as quarantining. The outbreak might be from a coronavirus that usually lives in bats. This infected another animal, possibly a pangolin. It then changed inside that other animal until it could infect humans. It originated at a wet market Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market and is linked to China’s wild animal meat trade. Live foxes, crocodiles, wolf pups, giant salamanders, snakes, rats, peacocks, porcupines, koalas and game meats were on the menu at the market. A 55-year-old person from Hubei province was the first human to contract the virus on November 17, 2019. A 61-year-old man who was a regular customer at the market was the first person to die from the virus on January 11, 2020. The exact origin of the virus is still unknown since the market in Wuhan sold a variety of live wild animals in cages. Chinese tourists have spread the virus by traveling to other countries and made it a worldwide pandemic. Racism and xenophobia against Chinese people and Asians increased during the pandemic. In November 2020, two companies, Pfizer and Moderna, said they had finished making COVID-19 vaccines. Both are over 90% effective. Two mRNA vaccines, one by Pfizer and one by Moderna, have been tested. Both were over 90% effective. Countries began planning to give the vaccine to many people.

In early 2020, some people began to think that the SARS-CoV-2 may have been made on purpose in a laboratory and either released by accident or on purpose like a weapon. Some Iranians thought the Americans might have made it. Chinese state media said COVID-19 came from the United States to China and not the other way around. Some Americans thought the Chinese might have made it. Some Britons thought it might have been created by accident by 5G cell phone networks. On March 17, 2020, scientists from Columbia University and other places published a paper in Nature Medicine showing that SARS-CoV-2 was almost surely not made by humans in a laboratory. They did this by comparing the genomes of different viruses to each other. The scientists saw that SARS-CoV-2 did not match any of the viral backbones that already exist for virologists to use. Within a few weeks, it became one of the most cited scientific papers in history, meaning that other scientists were reading and using it.