Most of us by now will be more than familiar with the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. However, given the onslaught of information, disinformation, and the many questionable sources of information among both, it is still hard to get a grasp on what genuinely appears to be the most significant global health crisis since the Spanish Flu of a century ago. Indeed, much of what follows is an attempt to bring many of those reports, from around the world and across the Internet, into one space, so that we might be able to contemplate this truly unprecedented event in more bite-sized portions.This is not an expose of the sort that has a big secret to reveal. And it is not looking to push one theory or another (although we will examine many of them). The reason this book came into existence is to document, in real time as opposed to retrospectively, how the virus unfolded and how it was both reported by media platforms and spun by various governments around the world - and how indeed it might be spun in the future, and then viewed through the sometimes perspective altering spectacles of time. While it is harder to achieve in the Internet-age (although certainly not impossible) the realization that the COVID-19 outbreak was so momentous and life-changing should also alert us as to how it might be remembered years later. History, after all, has a habit of being twisted to suit narratives and agendas. It is perhaps particularly important that this is not allowed to happen here. Given the multiple warnings throughout the 2000s of such an outbreak "just being around the corner" it is more than likely that we will face just another situation down the line, possibly in our own collective lifetimes. If we were to face it with a skewered recall of the outbreak of 2020 it just might put us on the backfoot even more than we found ourselves when the COVID-19 outbreak began.While the reach of the coronavirus pandemic is most certainly global, we will concentrate on several particular countries and areas around the world, not least the United Kingdom, from where this is written. However, it would be irresponsible to not examine the origins of the outbreak - at this point in time widely accepted to have begun in Wuhan, China. It would also be amiss to not examine the events in Italy, Spain, and France, where the death tolls have been excessively high in comparison to other countries in Europe and around the world. Why might that be? And lastly, we will examine in particular detail the United Kingdom and the United States, where the virus has hit particularly hard. Might it be coincidence that these two countries have arguably had the most controversial and questioned responses to the virus in the world - at least at a government level?We will also examine some of the deadliest outbreaks of plagues and pandemics of the past, and look to highlight some of the common factors in many of them, even those from hundreds of years ago, and why these factors need addressing still today. To say the COVID-19 outbreak is perhaps the first global emergency the world has faced in the twenty-first century in terms of the imminent death it leaves in its wake, would be an understatement. We must ensure that whatever lessons were seemingly not learned prior to the outbreak, are most definitely learned now as we move forward.