As of May 26, more than 346,000 people worldwide have died of COVID-19, the highly infectious respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus. The number of people who have tested positive for COVID-19 is 5.5 million, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. More than 2.2 million people have recovered.

At the end of December, public health officials from China informed the World Health Organization that they had a problem: an unknown, new virus was causing pneumonia-like illness in the city of Wuhan. They quickly determined that it was a coronavirus and that it was rapidly spreading through and outside of Wuhan.