One year ago, this week, CNN made an important announcement.

All right, CNN, starting this morning, is calling the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.

Overnight, the US death toll climbed to 22, a vast majority of those linked back to the

life care.

I remember being up all weekend in the lead up to that announcement.

You'll remember at the time the CDC and the World Health Organization had not yet declared

this a pandemic.

The president was still saying this is all going to go away.

So to make the call to go out there and say we are in a pandemic, everyone needs to prepare,

it was a tough decision.

The thing about pandemics, the thing about lots of illnesses is that you don't always see

it before it strikes you.

By the time it actually starts manifesting, you're late.

So you have to sort of be predictive of these things ahead of time.

Two days later, the World Health Organization decided to make the same call.

We're deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming

levels of inaction.

We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.

You know, it's pretty crazy to listen to these old clips.

Like then, the WHO reported that 4,291 people around the world had died from COVID-19.

Today, more than 2.6 million people are confirmed to have lost their lives to this virus.

2.6 million people died of a disease we hadn't even really defined a year ago.

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