How readers helped the Guardian cover the coronavirus pandemic

We realised Covid was not just the story of our lives - it would change everything about the way we worked

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It is hard to remember exactly when the penny dropped, when we realised the story we were attempting to cover was not only the story of our lives, but would change all of our lives.

We had started writing about coronavirus at the turn of the year. A scientific curiosity, it seemed, without a name. By the third week of January, our reporters in the region were describing the first human to human" transmissions.