Marking One Year of Covid-19: A Pandemic Declaration and Everything Changed

“How do you measure a year?” sings the cast of the musical “Rent,” which is set during the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Exactly 525,600 minutes after the World Health Organization first declared Covid-19 a pandemic, we find ourselves asking the same question.

There’s no shortage of numbers from the past 12 months. More than 117 million people infected and over 2.6 million dead around the world, including more than 520,000 fatalities in the U.S. Millions of people unemployed and millions more working from home—if they’re lucky.

Some new numbers offer at least a bit of respite from the grim toll of the past year: More than 326 million vaccine doses administered to date, including 95.7 million doses in the U.S. across 18.8% of the population.

Then there are the stories from 365 days of life as we’ve never known it. Going from never wearing a mask to amassing small, soft piles of them. The now-familiar squelch of hand sanitizer from a pump. How initially the changes to daily life were swift and overwhelming; then how, as the months dragged on, they slowed, even stalled.

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