In March 2020, La Sultane set out what was known about this newly identified coronavirus. Seven years later, the WHO records more than seven million confirmed deaths across the world, Tunisia has paid a heavy price, and the pandemic has transformed science, the economy and our everyday habits. Here is what has changed since that month of March when everything tipped over.
March 2020: what we knew then
COVID-19 — an acronym for coronavirus disease 2019 — was an emerging infectious disease, discovered in humans in China, in the province of Wuhan, in November 2019. First described as an epidemic, it was reclassified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020, the virus being present at that point in 150 countries, with at-risk areas outside China such as Singapore, South Korea, Iran and Italy.
Symptoms still poorly understood
At the time, the symptoms — fever, dry cough, fatigue, breathing difficulties — took up to 14 days after exposure to appear, which justified a two-week quarantine for travellers returning from at-risk areas. According to the WHO, around 80% of infected people recovered without any particular treatment, while one person in six developed more serious symptoms — the elderly, the immunocompromised and those with chronic illnesses being the most vulnerable. In Tunisia, a freephone number (190, then 80 101 919) had been set up to guide the public.
No vaccine, only barrier measures
At that stage, there was no vaccine against COVID-19. The WHO's recommendations went no further than washing hands regularly — judged more protective than wearing gloves — keeping at least one metre away from anyone with symptoms, and giving up handshakes and embraces. Seven years on, the gap with today's situation measures just how urgently science and our habits had to adapt.
The impact on lives: an unprecedented human toll
Worldwide, more than seven million COVID-19-related deaths were formally confirmed in 234 countries in five years, out of nearly 777 million recorded cases. These figures, the WHO points out, cover only the infections and deaths officially attributed to the disease: they are therefore very probably below the reality. The Organization itself has estimated the excess mortality associated with the pandemic at 14.9 million deaths for 2020 and 2021 alone.
Tunisia was not spared. As early as 17 March 2020, a curfew from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. was imposed across the whole country; on 20 March, President Kaïs Saïed announced a general lockdown, in force from 22 March to 4 April, with the army deployed to enforce it. According to the Ministry of Health's final count (June 2023), the pandemic caused 29,423 confirmed deaths in Tunisia for 1,153,361 recorded cases since March 2020 — a heavy toll for a country of fewer than twelve million inhabitants.
Science caught up with the virus
Vaccines developed in record time
Faced with a virus for which, in March 2020, “there is no vaccine”, the scientific response was spectacular: Pfizer/BioNTech's messenger RNA vaccine (BNT162b2) was authorised as early as December 2020, less than a year after the virus appeared — a feat for a technology that had never yet been approved against an infectious disease, when developing a vaccine usually takes more than a decade. Seven years of hindsight now make it possible to assess its long-term safety: a French EPI-PHARE study, published in December 2025 in the journal JAMA Network Open, followed nearly 29 million people aged 18 to 59 for a median duration of 45 months. The result: people who had received at least one dose of an mRNA vaccine showed a 25% lower risk of death from all causes than unvaccinated people.
Long COVID, a reality still poorly understood
Seven years on, one grey area remains: long COVID. A review of the literature published in Nature Reviews Microbiology estimated that at least 65 million people worldwide were affected, based on a cautious incidence of 10% across more than 651 million documented cases — a figure judged very probably underestimated. The WHO defines this condition as the persistence, for at least two months, of symptoms that appeared within three months of infection and are not explained by another diagnosis: cognitive and memory problems (36% of cases), fatigue (34%), mental health problems such as anxiety (31%) and breathlessness (24%) are among the most frequent. In France, Santé publique France estimated at the end of 2022 that around 4% of the adult population — that is, 2.06 million people — were concerned by this post-COVID condition as defined by the WHO. The exact scale of the phenomenon remains debated within the scientific community, notably because of under-diagnosis in the early days of the pandemic.
The economy under the shock of a global lockdown
Where the original article could only point to an emerging epidemic, hindsight reveals the scale of the economic shock. As early as June 2020, the International Monetary Fund was forecasting a 4.9% contraction in global GDP for the year, calling the crisis the worst recession since the Great Depression — a “great lockdown” whose effects were particularly violent for certain European economies, with falls projected at 12.5% for France and 12.8% for Spain and Italy.
In Tunisia, it was tourism, the country's economic backbone, that suffered most: tourism revenues fell by 64% in 2020, going from more than 4,800 million dinars in 2019 to around 1,800 million dinars, while arrivals dropped by 78% and overnight stays by 80.5%. Nearly 58% of travel agencies saw their turnover fall by at least 75% over the second half of 2020. Since then, the recovery has also played out somewhere other than the coast: domestic tourism in Tunisia has established itself as a lasting support for the sector.
The habits that have changed
Remote working, virtually non-existent before 2020, has settled durably into the professional landscape: in France, 63.6% of employees worked remotely at least once over the last twelve months, and 22% of private-sector employees at least once a month, often on a hybrid rhythm of two days out of five. A study by Insee even shows that remote working increased productivity in the companies that kept it on after the health crisis — food for thought on the future of work now being carried by a new generation of women employees. Our relationship with rest and with switching off has been transformed too — a subject La Sultane explores in Rest and the brain: why switching off costs so much.
More broadly, the pandemic has put self-care and collective health back at the centre of our priorities: hand hygiene, vigilance about symptoms and a more natural recourse to teleconsultation have become reflexes for part of the population, in the wake of a wider awareness of what wellbeing really covers — the social dimension of health that the crisis brought to light.
