Covid-19: The First Six Months

Covid-19: The First Six Months presents a meticulous, day-by-day chronicle of the pandemic's opening phase, capturing the epidemiological, medical, social, and cultural impacts of a rapidly unfolding global crisis. Drawing on a dataset of approximately 3,600 news reports, medical updates, and academic papers--collected in real time between January and June 2020--this book offers an unparalleled level of detail and precision. Beginning with retrospectively sourced coverage of events prior to January 2020, it traces the earliest signals of the outbreak and follows its progression across continents, documenting how governments, health systems, and communities responded to a threat unlike any in recent history. Each entry preserves the immediacy of the moment, reflecting the uncertainty, urgency, and evolving understanding that shaped decisions in the pandemic's first half-year. Modeled after the author's earlier work, "A Day-by-Day Chronicle of the 2013-2016 Ebola Outbreak" (Bullard, 2018), this volume provides both a comprehensive timeline and a rich, indexed source base for researchers. The references included form an extensive archive of early-pandemic sources, making it a unique and indispensable resource for those studying Covid-19, public health, epidemiology, and the history of disease. Much has been written about Covid-19, but no other work offers this level of chronological detail for its beginning. Covid-19: The First Six Months is both a definitive reference and a vivid historical record, preserving how the world first encountered--and began to understand--the defining public health challenge of the 21st century.