2020 - A Year In Posts: January, Climate Change, Tech Takeovers, A New Apple Keyboard And A Pandemic Prediction

At the beginning of 2020 there was no sign of the unprecedented year we were all to face and the most popular posts of the month were related to climate change and its impact on our lives.

A report into the quality of drinking water in the US was particular damning, whilst in the Southern Hemisphere wildfires across Australia were causing the skies to turn orange across New Zealand, as millions of trees were turned into ash, releases tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Elsewhere HP was busy fighting off a hostile takeover bid from Xerox, Apple was - correctly - predicted to be launching a new iPad keyboard with a trackpad and the unfortunate iOS 13 was still riddled with bugs.

The first mention of the Coronavirus came on January 27th, where - in what turns out to be an uncharacteristically prescient post - I warned that the outbreak was unlikely to be contained to China and would spread beyond national borders to become a global pandemic, similar in scale to that of 1918's Spanish Flu outbreak.

That followed a month where the outbreak had first reached global news services on January 5th and the first death had been reported on January 11th. By January 22nd the virus had spread to Thailand, South Korea and had arrived in the US. Within days reports of the virus had spread and had reached Europe, where things were about to get much. much worse.