As 2019 drew to a close, and we counted down the seconds to the start of the New Year, and a new decade, we looked ahead eagerly to a year of celebration - including the Olympic Games, the Euro football championships, the VE Day anniversary and much more. As we ushered in 2020, we paid scant attention as news reports began to reach us from distant Wuhan in China of the outbreak of a virus not previously encountered by humanity. Few of us realised that the entire globe was now facing the most severe pandemic in more than a century - the spread of which would fundamentally change the lives of each and every one of us. As we mourn our dead and continue to grapple with the many effects and repercussions of the still ravaging pandemic, the author, a medical doctor, offers his unique perspective on how the virus spread as rapidly and widely as it did, our response to that threat and, looking ahead, how we should adjust to having this unwanted guest: "It is my hope that humanity will at long last realise the need to work together as an entity to tackle the plague with our concerted rather than divided efforts, so as to enable us to get on top of the problem and, in so doing, contribute towards the return of normalcy on earth, to the way of life we were accustomed to prior to the emergence of the impudent novel Coronavirus, aka SARS-CoV-2, in our midst."