USA Today Five years ago Monday, someone was identified with COVID-19 for the first time on American soil.
In the years since, 1.2 million Americans have died from the virus, and more than 7 million worldwide.
On Jan. 20, 2020, laboratory tests confirmed that man in his 30s who had recently returned from Wuhan, China, was infected with the novel coronavirus, which hadn’t yet been named.
The chaos and fear that would unfold couldn’t be foreseen at the time, but they would mark the start of a period marked by uncertainty and public health transformation.