It has been five years now since the words “coronavirus” and “COVID-19” became the words we heard every day as what turned out to be a very deadly virus emerged from a place most of us had never heard of. Wuhan China.
The official declaration of a worldwide pandemic happened five years ago this week. And next week it will be five years after the nation’s first “stay-at-home” order was declared in California.
But after all that went on in those first months and years, from watching the number of cases and the number of deaths on the cable news channels rise every day to the orders to “mask up” and the daily news conference updates at the local, state and national levels, after five years, we still don’t know for where the deadly virus came to be.
Even now, experts disagree about how COVID-19 started.
There have been two theories over these years. It was transmitted by bats, which do carry viruses to other animals and then spread to humans. Or it was a leak of the virus from a lab in China that is a center of coronavirus research.
But we may never really know for sure which one of those theories is true or whether there is another theory still to be discovered.
But one thing we do know for sure. That we need to be better prepared. From every level of government to every individual, so that the next time a pandemic comes along, it won’t be as bad.
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