The COVID-19 pandemic and territoriality : some initial reflections

Abstract

Since its outbreak in the Chinese province of Wuhan in late 2019, the Coronavirus pandemic has spread with remarkable speed across the world. While during the initial weeks of the outbreak, the disease seemed to be confined to mainland China, on January 20th three other countries had reported cases of Coronavirus—Japan, South Korea and Thailand—and the first confirmed case in the USA came on the following day. By late February, Europe faced its first major outbreak in northern Italy, with cases in other European countries rising rapidly. At the same time, Iran emerged as another major hotspot of the pandemic, and Africa and Latin America also began reporting their first infections of Coronavirus. By June 2020, the pandemic—even though seemingly subsiding in some parts of the world—had reached practically every corner of the globe with more than 7 million confirmed cases and around 400,000 deaths associated with the virus. Only a handful of countries have not yet reported cases of Coronavirus, most of them small and rather isolated island states.