The number of cases doubled roughly every week during the early days of the outbreak.
China a country with a population close to 1.4 billion would report new daily cases in the hundreds.
Still not enough to deeply trouble health officials in most countries.
News media were criticised for either giving too much attention to the coronavirus, or not enough.
By mid-March, Europe and specifically Italy was considered the centre of the pandemic.
A woman wearing a face mask walks along Rockefeller Center Plaza in March 2020 in New York.
Photo: AFP
By that point, there were about 50,000 confirmed cases being recorded every day, and more than 1.7 billion people worldwide were under some form of lockdown.