A Timeline of COVID-19 from Discovery to Vaccine By Stephanie Parker, Stacker News , Diana Shishkina, Stacker News AND Betsy Ladyzhets, Stacker News On 1/9/21 at 10:00 AM EST COVID-19 has spread quickly around the world, causing more than 1.7 million deaths and infecting more than 81 million people as of Dec. 28, 2020, according to Johns Hopkins' Coronavirus Resource Center. It's already hard to remember life before COVID-19—but it was less than a year ago when a doctor in China sounded the alarm about a new respiratory virus. Since then, cases have been confirmed in nearly every country and on every continent except Antarctica. The United States today has the most COVID-19 cases in the world, and cases are rising quickly as people defied CDC recommendations to gather for fall and winter holidays.