On December 31, 2019, China reported an outbreak of a new
coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
Coronavirus-2) that was detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province,
China. This new coronavirus was deemed responsible for the disease
in humans now called COVID-19 (i.e., Coronavirus Disease 2019). In
a matter of weeks, COVID-19 brought the world to a standstill,
prompting the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a global
pandemic on March 11, 2020. At the time COVID-19 was declared a
pandemic, there were a reported 113,584 cases globally—604 in
the United States—and a total of 4,291 deaths. As of December
15, 2020, over 73 million people had been infected with the virus
in at least 191 countries and over 1.6 million people had died from
the virus.1 COVID-19 has dealt a similarly lethal blow
to the global economy amounting to trillions of dollars in losses,
and resulting in quarantines, curfews, closed or limited access to
business, unprecedented
