The COVID-19 pandemic is widely documented as having originated in Wuhan, a city in China's Hubei province, where the first cluster of cases tied to a new coronavirus was identified in December 2019.
From there the virus spread across the world within a few months, and the World Health Organization officially declared it a pandemic in March 2020.
India, Indonesia and Malaysia were all affected by the outbreak later on, but none of them is recognised as the point where it began.