PEMBROKE PARK, Fla. – The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic five years ago and many of the changes made to avoid illness have become part of life.
The pandemic was deadly in the U.S. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 1.2 million had died of COVID-19 as of Thursday.
The illness also has had lasting health effects on some COVID patients, but there are also lasting examples of inspiring resilience.
The pandemic changed the way we support our community. In Phoenix, Arizona, Hunter Rogers said it had inspired him to open Pizza To The Rescue, which donates 25% of the profits to the Almost There Rescue, a nonprofit dog shelter that Tiffany Roschmann, now his fiancee, is passionate about.
The pandemic also changed the way we connect with others. From a farm in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, Aidan Muse was a little boy when he shared videos of himself playing bluegrass music to his chickens with his banjo. He quickly amassed millions of views and now the professional musician is touring the country.
Necessity became the mother of reinvention during the pandemic. Howard Hatch, a volunteer at The Sacramento History Museum in California, didn’t know what TikTok was when the museum had to close to the public, but he learned about its power to educate others after Jared Jones had an idea.
Hatch, 83, was an expert on the museum’s nearly 2-century-old printing press, so Jones, the museum’s social media manager, recorded videos and turned him into a TikTok celebrity. The museum’s videos had 47.5 million likes and 2.8 million followers on Tuesday afternoon.
The pandemic is history. WHO declared it had ended in 2023. Scientists are still learning. The CDC Museum COVID-19 timeline starts on Dec. 12, 2019, when a “cluster of patients” in China’s Hubei Province, in the city of Wuhan, reported the symptoms of “an atypical pneumonia-like illness” that did not respond well to standard treatments.
The timeline ends on July 8, 2022, when the FDA “fully” approved Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for everyone ages 12 to 15 years. COVID is still around. Government-issued take-home tests for COVID-19 are no longer available, so those who need to get tested can now find these at their nearby pharmacy.