LOS ANGELES - Wednesday marks the one-year anniversary of when the global medical community received an alert about an unidentified cluster of a pneumonia-like illness that would later come to be known as COVID-19.
A year later, the deadly virus has exploded into a global pandemic, infecting more than 82 million people around the world and upending the lives of nearly everyone on Earth.Last year on Dec.
30, 2019 a minute before midnight, the ProMed bulletin service released a notice warning of the then-unidentified virus. "The so-called unexplained pneumonia cases refer to the following 4 cases of pneumonia that cannot be diagnosed at the same time: fever (greater than or equal to 38C); imaging characteristics of pneumonia or acute.