First Coronavirus Outbreak

Plague / Epidemic

(also known as CoViD-19)
The first major pandemic of the Twenty-First Century

While not as devastating to human life as later pandemics, the first iteration of the SARS-type coronavirus impacted globalization and global supply chains, threw the world economy into the worst depression since the mid-Twentieth Century and radically transformed working, social, and public environments. The massive shift in cultural and social isolationism made it perhaps the most jarring of the pandemics.   The CoViD-19 pandemic is also credited as a primary factor in the push for artificial intelligence—not only as a medical diagnostic tool against future disease outbreaks, but also as a means of political and economic planning and implementation.