As I was editing yet another story about the toll COVID-19 has taken on our community, I tried to remember how it all began.
When was our first story about this new virus? I couldn’t recall.
I queried Merlin, our electronic archive. Merlin remembered a lot. As of Monday, we’d carried 4,941 stories containing the term “COVID,” of which 1,381 were written by our staff. Surely by now we have eclipsed 5,000 total stories and 1,400 local stories.
Here was the first story I could find in Merlin, from Bloomberg News:
Pneumonia outbreak spurs WHO action
Publication date: Jan. 7, 2020 Page: A7 Section: World
MELBOURNE, Australia — A mysterious lung infection in the Chinese city of Wuhan is being monitored by the World Health Organization, which said it’s in active communication with its counterparts in China, where an investigation is underway to determine the cause. …
As of Friday, 44 people had been diagnosed with pneumonia, the cause of which is unknown, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission said in a statement. …
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