A year of COVID-19: A sobering look at how California, U.S. compare to the rest of the world - Pacifica Tribune

A year after a new coronavirus was identified as the cause of a mysterious pneumonia outbreak in China, SARS-CoV-2 has redefined life around the world, but nowhere has it been more keenly felt than in the United States.

The country has seen more than twice as many coronavirus infections as India, whose 10.6 million cases are the world’s second-most in a country with four times as many people.

Since 2004, there have not been any known SARS cases reported anywhere in the world, the CDC said.

The deadlier Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012, has infected a little over 2,200 people since and killed 791, according to the World Health Organization.

By mid-March last year, the Bay Area and California would emerge as national leaders in the fight against the virus, implementing the first coordinated regional and then statewide stay-home orders.

A year after California reported some of the first U.S.

But even after some of the nation’s worst outbreaks in recent months — nearly two-thirds of all of California’s COVID-19 cases and nearly half of the state’s deaths have been reported since Dec 1 — the Golden State has fared better than some others.

New York, with half as many people as California, ranked second in deaths by population among the states, behind neighboring New Jersey, while California was 39th, according to New York Times data.

The virus has been as much an economic as a health disaster, and experts say California has paid a price in lost jobs for its aggressive efforts to control virus outbreaks by restricting business activity.

Infectious disease experts have offered a variety of explanations — more poverty and population density and more lax observance of health orders in Southern California.

Swartzberg, however, said that the Bay Area’s experience with HIV in the 1980s both tested and improved its public health systems

“The Bay Area’s management of the HIV infection was a model for the rest of the world,” Swartzberg said