In early January, the World Health Organization first announced the emergence of a mysterious coronavirus that had been discovered in Wuhan, China, nearly 7,000 miles from Long Beach, a city basking as usual in the weeks before spring, living life as always: Shopping, dining out, attending concerts and sporting events, attending classes, gathering with friends, only barely aware of the virus and not overly concerned about it. - ADVERTISEMENT - From our current vantage, it’s difficult to believe life once went on like that. For a while, it was a faraway problem. The virus was immune to distance and boundaries, though, and it stealthily traveled from person to person, country to country, aboard airplanes and cruise ships, and when it came, it came hard and changed how we live in Long Beach and throughout the world, and, in one short but ferocious year it killed more than 2.5 million people worldwide, including more than 520,000 in the United States and 857 in Long Beach.