I journal daily and like to capture the news among my daily record. The first time I found COVID/Coronavirus mentioned by BBC News was January 3rd 2020 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025.

It is of course possible I missed a story but before January 3rd there was little to no mainstream news coverage. It is quite frustrating to find accurate articles now as many sites are falsely returned in date range Google searches. All "mystery flu-like pneumonia" stories I've found reported in December 2019 are medical news so it is extremely unlikely someone would come across such an article as part of normal news reading.

On January the 4th their were posters (printed A4) up on Public Transport in Hong Kong. I remember thinking it was very strange - I had heard a story on the BBC world service the night before. The posters warned of a "Novel Pneumonia from Southern China". How the world changed...

How it changed indeed! Reading my journal for the first four months of 2020 is fascinating. I must have read over those first few months ten times since. So much has happened with advice and guidance changing as we learn more about the virus and the disease. So much mis- and disinformation. Crazy behaviours all over. I am so glad I keep a journal as it will be quite something to read back in a decade or two.

Especially for my 8 year old son. He is old enough to understand things are not normal but young enough to not fully understand the gravity of the situation or have memories of much outside of his little bubble.

The BBC were definitely covering it in late December 2019 - I distinctly remember the TV coverage on New Years Eve.

If you have any links to articles or news reports I would be very grateful.

Here is a western news report from mid November: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/16/china-bubonic-plague-ou...

If you can get access to an archive of South China Morning Post that hasn't been scrubbed, the term you want to search for is "mystery pneumonia" or "sars like".

Thanks, I have several Chinese/Asia news sources from December however I was asking for a BBC reference as M2Ys4U mentioned it was reported by the BBC on New Years Eve and the earliest I have is January 3rd.

btw this is where the "19" comes from.

According to Giuseppe Remuzzi there were strange pneumonia cases in northern Italy in November 2019, but as far as I can see they were not reported until March 2020.

Apart from that I remember the first reports from China in December 2019.

I remember hearing about it prior to that as well. I remember because I was building a shed and had someone helping me who was talking about it and it was prior to the new year, early December at the latest. He heard about it on a Doomsday type podcast.

I remember reading about it end of December 2019. I believe it was a Reddit thread with some worrying reports on the ground.

I found one (english) Timeline that Starts before 31.

https://bfpg.co.uk/2020/04/covid-19-timeline/

I too remember talking about it on Christmas.

Funnily enough, there were some memes about it before December 17th 2019. Comparing some disease from 1920 with 2020.