When did the COVID-19 pandemic start?

Doctors in Wuhan, Hubei province, began reporting clusters of unusual pneumonia in December 2019, and China informed the World Health Organization on 31 December. The cause was identified as a new coronavirus, later named SARS-CoV-2, in early January 2020. The WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January 2020 and then called it a pandemic on 11 March 2020. Lockdowns followed across the world, and at one point roughly half of humanity was under some form of stay-at-home order. The WHO ended the global health emergency on 5 May 2023, by which time more than 7 million deaths had been officially reported.