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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
World
Neil Murphy

Chilling animation shows how coronavirus spread like wildfire across world in 6 months

A chilling new video has revealed how coronavirus spread around the world following the outbreak in China earlier this year.

The data visualisation was put together by designers Global Stats who used the World Health Organisation 's (WHO) Situation Reports to compile the animation.

The eerie timelapse shows the shifting response to the pandemic since the first cases were reported in Wuhan, China late last year.

The video illustrates how the virus took hold in Asia before spreading to Europe and its new epicentre in the Americas.

The death rate is also charted in the video and shows how it climbed dramatically as it reached Europe before a modest decline.

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The virus started out with several cases in Wuhan, China (Global Stats)

The virus started out as a pneumonia-like infection with just a few reported clusters in China, Vietnam and South Korea.

However, by early March the virus had forced Italy into a shutdown before reaching the United Kingdom, where over 45,000 people are now confirmed to have died with coronavirus.

Covid-19 was eventually declared a pandemic on March 11 by the World Health Organisation as the global economy went into lockdown to help control the spread.

By February the virus was still mostly confined to China and south Asia (Global Stats)
By April most of the world had gone into lockdown to contain the spread (Global Stats)

 

By then, the virus had infected more than 125,000 people, and killed more than 4,500.

And on April 1 the WHO reported that deaths had doubled over the course of just one week.

The US is now the world's worst affected country and saw the deaths of over 2,000 Americans in a single day on April 11.

Global deaths surpassed 200,000 on April 25.

The US has emerged as the world's worst-hit country (Global Stats)
Some 13million people have now been infected with the virus (Global Stats)

 

The death rate appears to have reached its peak in April with around seven percent of cases being fatal, and closer to nine percent in Europe.

As of July 16, some 13.7m people have been infected with the virus with around 587,000 dying in the outbreak.

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