This is my attempt at building a comprehensive timeline of events that describe the COVID-19 pandemic.
My goal for this project is to tell a story. As I start this project, I don’t know where the story is going, what subplots will develop, what characters will appear, develop, and maybe disappear. I certainly don’t know how this story is going to end. But I think it’s going to be a wild ride.
This is an America-centric timeline, but I’ve included key pandemic events from around to world to keep perspective that this truly is a global catastrophe, not just American.
A Living Document
Since the pandemic is a work in progress, this story is a work in progress. As new information becomes available I plan on incorporating it where it belongs on the timeline. So please come back often and see how this story grows. With luck, it may have a happy ending.
Source Data
All source data in the form of an Excel spreadsheet is available at the end of this timeline under a creative commons license. Readers may freely download this and add to it. If you know of a key event that should be in this, please contact me and let me know. All references, cited in this timeline and linked to icons, can be found in the spreadsheet. My readers are invited to use the links and follow threads where ever they lead.
All events are placed in the timeline when they occur, not when they were “discovered” or otherwise made public. In some cases specific events were not publicized until months after the event occurred. I think that putting these event in proper context helps understand the overall history of how we got here.
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Prelude <> Nov/Dec 2019 <> January 2020 <> February <> March <> April <> May <> June <> July <> August <> September <> Source Data
Prelude
This timeline will start several years prior to the first known appearance of the novel coronavirus. I believe this is necessary to create proper context for events during the actual pandemic.
February 2007
The publishes “Interim Pre-pandemic Planning Guidance: Community Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Mitigation in the United States—Early, Targeted, Layered Use of Nonpharmaceutical Interventions,” a document intended to provide interim planning guidance for communities, that focuses on measures other than vaccination and drug treatment to reduce harm from influenza pandemics. June 2010
As a “lessons learned” from the 2009 novel H1N1 pandemic, the funded the publication of “Assessing Policy Barriers to Effective Public Health Response to the H1N1 Influenza Pandemic,” to systematically identify and assess key policy barriers encountered during the H1N1 response. Year 2011
U.S. Congressional budget battles, fueled by the recently elected wave of “Tea Party” Republicans, forced drastic budgets cuts. One casualty of these cuts was the National Emergency Medical Stockpile, which was formed to maintain adequate supplies of masks, ventilators, pharmaceuticals and other medical equipment needed to respond to a public health crisis. Year 2014
Building on the Ebola pandemic experience, the Obama administration set up a permanent epidemic monitoring and command group inside the White House and another in the —both of which followed the scientific and public health leads of the , , and the diplomatic advice of the State Department. President Obama requested funding from Congress to set up a public health infrastructure needed to deal with future pandemic outbreaks. But most funding requests to purchase protective equipment and train medical staff to prepare for future outbreaks were denied by a Republican-controlled House of Representatives that was filled with Tea Party-affiliated politicians.May 27, 2014
is awarded a grant for $666,442 for research titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” from the . This award included sub-awards to and . Upon review by a number of experts, this research may or may not have involved “” experiments, but research was conducted on bat coronavirus.October 27, 2014
The US government surprises many researchers by announcing that it will temporarily stop funding new research that makes certain viruses more deadly or transmissible. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is also asking researchers who conduct such experiments on influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) to stop their work until a risk assessment is completed. Critics of such work argue that it is unnecessarily dangerous and risks accidentally releasing viruses with pandemic potential — such as an engineered H5N1 influenza virus that easily spreads between ferrets breathing the same air. Debate over the safety of these experiments reignited in July 2017, after a series of lab accidents involving mishandled pathogens at the in Atlanta, Georgia.Year 2016
National Security Council develops “NSC Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.” based upon lessons learned from the Ebola experience. The purpose of this publication was to assist U.S. Government leaders in coordinating a complex response to a high-consequence emerging disease threat.January 1, 2017
The updates the 2007 Interim “Pre-pandemic Planning Guidance” with new guidelines and information titled “Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza“. This includes checklists for specific action steps to help public health professionals and administrators of schools, workplaces, and mass gatherings plan and prepare for a flu pandemic and implement Nonpharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs).January 6, 2017
The Pentagon develops a draft memo “USNORTHCOM Branch Plan 3560 Pandemic Influenza and Infectious Disease Response,” updating an earlier 2012 memo, incorporating insights from several recent disease outbreaks including the 2012 Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) Coronavirus. The plan states: “Competition for, and scarcity of resources will include…non-pharmaceutical MCM [Medical Countermeasures] (e.g., ventilators, devices, personal protective equipment such as face masks and gloves), medical equipment, and logistical support. This will have a significant impact on the availability of the global workforce.”January 13, 2017
As part of the presidential transition and turnover, outgoing President Obama’s transition team conduct tabletop disaster response activities with Trump’s top aides. One of those tests simulated a strain of novel and deadly influenza they called H9N2, originating in Asia and quickly spreading to Europe and then to the U.S. “Health officials warn that this could become the worst influenza pandemic since 1918,” the Obama team told Trump’s aides during the exercise.
Take-aways from this exercise included the critical nature of response times, and the need for medical countermeasure strategies.January 20, 2017
Donald Trump sworn in as the 45th President of the United States.Late 2017
Top health and science officials at the U.S. embassy in Beijing attended a conference in the Chinese capital. There, they saw a presentation on a new study put out by a group of Chinese scientists, including several from a Wuhan lab, in conjunction with the U.S. . The new study was entitled “Discovery of a Rich Gene Pool of Bat SARS-Related Coronaviruses Provides New Insights into the Origin of SARS Coronavirus.” These researchers had found a population of bats from caves in Yunnan Province that gave them insight into how SARS coronaviruses originated and spread, possibly even the actual cave SARS originated from.January 18, 2018
U.S. embassy health and science officials in Beijing send three teams of experts in late 2017 and early 2018 to meet with the scientists, among them at her Wuhan lab. The Chinese researchers told shocked US officials they didn’t have enough properly trained technicians to safely operate their BSL-4 lab and asked for more support to get the lab up to top standards. Diplomats write the first of two cables back to Washington reporting on their visits to the Wuhan lab. They urged Washington to support bringing the lab up to top safety standards. They also warned that the researchers had found new bat coronaviruses which could easily infect human cells, and which used the same cellular route that had been used by the original SARS coronavirus.February 1, 2018
The global health section of the is cut by 80 percent. Much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries the Global Health Section was working in was reduced from 49 to 10. Countries where the is planning to scale back from include some of the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, including China.Spring 2018
The White House pushed Congress to cut funding for a number of Obama-era disease security programs. White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the , , , and . The government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was also eliminated.March 18, 2018
submitts a research grant proposal to for a $14.2 million project aimed at “defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses.” The proposal includes a plan to study potentially dangerous pathogens by generating full-length, infectious bat coronaviruses in a lab and inserting genetic features that could make coronaviruses better able to infect human cells. This grant request appears to have been rejected and not funded. This document was discovered and released by the group .April 10, 2018
Homeland Security adviser, Tom Bossert, is fired as the president’s new national security adviser, John Bolton, consolidates power in the White House. Bossert had repeatedly called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks.May 7, 2018
The hosted a daylong conference focused on mining information from the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic for lessons on the present and warnings for the future. Implicit was the understanding that while the 1918 pandemic was a singular catastrophe, conditions in the 21st century were ideal for another outbreak.May 2018
Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, tasked with directing a national response to a pandemic, abruptly departed from his post leading the global health security team on the National Security Council amid a reorganization of the council by then-National Security Advisor John Bolton. Ziemer’s team was then disbanded. This team was created by the Obama administration in 2014 after the Ebola pandemic, intended to monitor and prepare for future pandemics.March 12, 2019
A study of wastewater in the City of Barcelona, Spain, reveals that traces of the Coronavirus was present in a water sample taken on March 12, 2019. These results, sent to a high impact journal as a pre-print pending peer review in the archive medRxiv, suggest the infection was present before knowing about any case of COVID-19 in any part of the world. Scientists speculate the novel coronavirus may have been initially less contagious, and then mutated, which explains why it took such a long time to find a COVID-19 patient in Europe. This report was published June 13, 2020.July 2019
Dr. Linda Quick was a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as resident adviser to Chinese health officials. She left the role upon learning her position would be discontinued in September. In the position — officially known as the resident adviser to the US Field Epidemiology Training Program in China — Quick trained field epidemiologists who helped track, investigate and contain diseases at the epicenter of outbreaks.August 2019
A study published by Harvard Medical School in June 2020 “Analysis of Hospital Traffic and search engine data in Wuhan China Indicates Early Disease Activity in the Fall of 2019” reports that the novel coronavirus might have hit the Chinese city of Wuhan as early as August 2019. The study analyzed satellite images of hospital traffic in Wuhan and search engine trends related to the virus.September 2019
The Trump administration ends a $200-million pandemic early-warning program aimed at training scientists in China and other countries to detect and respond to such a threat. Called , the initiative launched in 2009 also trained and supported staff in 60 foreign laboratories including the Bio-lab in Wuhan, China.The Council of Economic Advisers publish “Mitigating the Impact of Pandemic Influenza through Vaccine Innovation.” This report provides estimates of the potentially large health and economic losses in the United States associated with influenza pandemics.A study by the Italian National Cancer Institute (INT) released November 16, 2020, indicates that the Coronavirus was circulating in Italy as early as September 2019. The data shows that 11.6% of 959 healthy volunteers developed coronavirus antibodies as revealed in a lung cancer screening trial conducted between September 2019 and March 2020. A further SARS-CoV-2 antibodies test was carried out by the University of Siena for the same research titled “Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the pre-pandemic period in Italy”. It showed that four cases dating back to the first week of October were positive for antibodies, meaning they had got infected in September. October 2019
The and collaborated to create a pandemic response exercise labeled “Crimson Contagion 2019.” The after action report identified six key findings including insufficient funding sources for the federal government to use in response to a severe influenza pandemic, lack of cohesive organizational structure across federal, state, and local jurisdictions, and inadequate medical countermeasures supply and production chains.A team composed of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHU) and The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) releases the Global Health Security (GHS) Index report, the first comprehensive assessment and benchmarking of health security and related capabilities across the 195 countries that make up the States Parties to the International Health Regulations (IHR [2005]). Overall findings show no country is fully prepared for epidemics or pandemics. Collectively, international preparedness is weak. Many countries do not show evidence of the health security capacities and capabilities that are needed to prevent, detect, and respond to significant infectious disease outbreaks. October 6
In a study published in May 2020 researchers determined that, based upon estimates, the COVID-2 pandemic may have started as early as 6 October 2019 to 11 December 2019. October 18 – 27
The 2019 Military World Games, branded the “Peace Games,” is hosted in Wuhan, China. The largest military sports event ever held in China, more than 9,000 athletes representing the militaries of more than 100 countries competed in 27 sports ranging from golf to parachuting. The US military delegation to Wuhan includes 188 athletes, 24 coaches, 18 team captains, 15 medical providers, 10 referees, nine public-affairs officers, seven “senior leaders,” nine CISM (International Military Sports Council), and two State Department personnel. After-the-fact analysis indicated many of these athletes may have been infected, and brought the virus back to their home countries. .What We’re Fighting
Popup Windows
In addition to downloadable files and sidebar text, I’ve also scattered popup windows throughout this timeline. These popup windows provide amplifying information on key events.
Popup Window Example
Icon Symbols
Meaning of icons used in the main timeline narrative:General Information Continuation of previous information, with a different reference
State-of-Emergency or Stay-At-Home Declared or Rescinded
Provides a video clip
Provides a pop-up information window
– Move your mouse over an acronym, name, or term, used in this timeline for an 
Link for a Download File
Preamble
My Preamble and full disclosure of bias
Commentary
No One Could Have Anticipated…
2006 – 2008
Avian Flu
2009 / 2015
Swine Flu
2014
Ebola
2012 / 2015 / 2020
MERS
2020
Coronavirus
Documentation
The following downloads are original documents referenced in this section of timeline.
“National Strategy for Pandemic influenza“, Published November 2005, an earlier version of the NSC Playbook published in 2016
CDC Pre-pandemic Planning Guidance, 2007 Edition
Assessing Policy Barriers to Effective Public Health Response to the H1N1 Influenza Pandemic 2010
Research grant award from Health and Human Services to EcoHealth Alliance titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” May 27, 2014 (Large file 214MB)
NSC Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents 2016
Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza 2017
USNORTHCOM Branch Plan 3560 Pandemic Influenza and Infectious Disease Response 2017
“Facilitated Group Discussion Group Response” Package from January 13, 2017 Presidential Transition Team exercise on pandemic preparations. Published November 30, 2017.
“Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus.” Research paper published by scientists from the Chinese and US on origin of SARS Coronavirus found in bats.
ECOHealth Alliance research grant proposal to DARPA for coronavirus research, March 18, 2018. This research grant request appears to have been denied. Discovered and released by
Mitigating the Impact of Pandemic Influenza through Vaccine Innovation 2019
Harvard Medical School: “Analysis of Hospital Traffic and Search
Engine Data in Wuhan China indicates
Early Disease Activity in the Fall of 2019″ (Note: This study made available through a Creative Commons License.)
Flyer on the Global Program, designed to provide early alerts of developing pandemics. Program canceled September 2019
Crimson Contagion 2019
Global Health Security Index Building Collective Action and Accountability October 2019
MedRxiv Archives
Study hosted by the MedRxiv archives, published as a pre-print pending peer review by the Universiata de Barcelona, June 13, 2020, reports finding traces of novel coronavirus in Barcelona, Spain, wastewater sample of March 12, 2019. To date this is the earliest known presence of the novel coronavirus.
“Sentinel surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater anticipates the occurrence of COVID-19 cases“
Tumori Journal
Study hosted by the Tumori Journal, conducted by the Italian National Cancer Institute (INT) and released November 16, 2020, which indicates that the Coronavirus was circulating in Italy as early as September 2019.
Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the prepandemic period in Italy
Additional Reading
The following article offers exceptional insight into the years previous to the Coronavirus pandemic, showing the amount of preparation various government and non-government agencies put into response planning for future pandemics.
Meatpacking Companies Dismissed Years of Warnings but Now Say Nobody Could Have Prepared for COVID-19
This article provides an interesting in-depth look at a new type of research team that developed during the pandemic, responsible for uncovering documents key to understanding the origins. The group, , also provides insight into the future of Internet-based research.
Exclusive: How Amateur Sleuths Broke the Wuhan Lab Story and Embarrassed the Media
This article, published September 9, 2021, provides insight into possible US-funding to a Wuhan Lab for research.
NIH DOCUMENTS PROVIDE NNIH Documents Provide New Evidence U.S. Funded Gain-Of-Function Research In Wuhan
This is an exhaustive article providing an in-depth look at investigations into the origin of the Coronavirus, and politicizing that has “muddied the waters” around valid research.
The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins
This is an exhaustive research article on the origins of the Coronavirus. The authors of this article, published July 26, 2022, show evidence that the origins were in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China.
Abstract: Understanding how severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in 2019 is critical to preventing zoonotic outbreaks before they become the next pandemic. The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, was identified as a likely source of cases in early reports but later this conclusion became controversial. We show the earliest known COVID-19 cases from December 2019, including those without reported direct links, were geographically centered on this market. We report that live SARS-CoV-2 susceptible mammals were sold at the market in late 2019 and, within the market, SARS-CoV-2-positive environmental samples were spatially associated with vendors selling live mammals. While there is insufficient evidence to define upstream events, and exact circumstances remain obscure, our analyses indicate that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred via the live wildlife trade in China, and show that the Huanan market was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic
Prelude <> Nov/Dec 2019 <> January 2020 <> February <> March <> April <> May <> June <> July <> August <> September <> Source Data
