Initially discovered in Wuhan, China, on Dec. 31, 2019, the virus, which would soon spark a world-wide pandemic, felled a man in Washington state who had just returned from Wuhan, on Jan, 21, 2020. The virus rapidly spread throughout the U.S. and the world, and as of today, more than 68 million cases and 855,000 deaths have been reported in the U.S. Worldwide, an estimated 335 million have contracted COVID-19 and 5.5 million have died.
Two months following the arrival of the first U.S. COVID-19 case, I wrote the first of several columns about the virus that have appeared in this newspaper over the past two years, describing the spread of the disease in Nevada and paying particular attention to the growth of scams and frauds affecting those who tested positive for COVID-19. My first column was headlined “Scams Proliferate as Virus Spreads Across the U.S.,” and I wrote about “the online peddling of fake COVID-19 test kits, pills, vaccines, food supplements and a wide variety of other…
