America is winning. "The United States leading the world in both deaths and infections."

Central Park in Manhattan on Monday.Credit...

New York Times

After 100 days, there have been more than one million confirmed infections and a country has been transformed.

It has been 100 days since a 35-year-old man presented to an urgent care clinic in Snohomish County, Wash., with a four-day history of cough and fever and tested positive.

His was the first case to be detected. Since then, more than one million people had tested positive in the United States.

Residents in most states in the country — along with more than half of all humanity — have been ordered to shelter in their homes in the hopes of slowing the spread of the highly contagious virus and to try to keep hospital systems from being overwhelmed.

Still, more than 53,000 people across the United States have died — roughly one in four of the 210,000 deaths around the world.

TIMELINE
Read about how the pandemic has unfolded.

Epidemiologists have estimated that the true number of infections may be about 10 times the known number, and preliminary testing of how many people have antibodies seems to support that view. Similarly, the official death toll is likely to vastly underestimate the true number by at least several thousand, according to an analysis of mortality data by The New York Times.

While the timeline for the spread of the virus across the country has shifted as public health authorities find evidence that the pathogen was spreading in communities earlier than believed, the speed at which the world has been transformed is shocking.

The global economy has suffered such a swift and sudden decline that economists have had to reach back to the Great Depression for analogies. More than 26 million people in the United States have lost their jobs.

Masks are becoming an accepted part of public life, which is why there was such a backlash on Tuesday after Vice President Mike Pence flouted the Mayo Clinic’s protocols on wearing a protective face covering on a visit there.

With the United States leading the world in both deaths and infections, the image of the country has taken a beating around the world, and Americans have been forced to re-examine their own self-image.

The country has watched Mr. Trump speak about the pandemic almost every day in ways that were alternately misleading, resentful, insulting, dangerous and, often, sown with self-praise.

But as the country tries to slowly move out of a lockdown and find a way to restore some form of public life, with no vaccine or therapy yet available, the virus is still setting the course.

FIRST CASES
Read about the investigation into the roots of the virus in the U.S. And about the changing understanding of the spread of the virus.