In the grip of a pandemic, the news has, generally, not been great fun to read. Most headlines are filled with death, mayhem, and destruction, interspersed with the occasional joyous paragraph about the ongoing war in the Middle East.

And then, a headline comes along that’s a bit more optimistic. In this case, the idea that vegetarian diets cut your risk of Covid-19 by more than half! According to scientists, it appears, the cure for Covid-19 is as simple as adding a few sprouts to your life and calling it a day.

One of the Big Questions about SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, has for a while been about its origins. Most viruses that cause disease in humans have long, fascinating origin stories, with jumps from animal to animal until they finally make it into people and start killing people. But Covid-19, goes the theory, must be lab-grown — either from an intentional lab leak or a mistake of epic proportions — there’s simply too much circumstantial evidence to ignore!

This idea doesn’t really make sense. There’s no special reason to believe that Covid-19 must have been grown in a lab…

Of the many impacts of the global pandemic we’ve found ourselves living through, one of the few welcome things has been the sudden and unexpected love of epidemiology. Two years ago, being an epidemiologist was a faintly embarrassing experience, where the phrase “I work in epidemiology” was either met with a blank stare or questions about people’s skin.

Sometimes I thought I should get a t-shirt saying “no, that’s a dermatologist” just to answer the question quickly.

Covid-19 vaccines are amazing. They have turned what were enormous, horrific epidemics in country after country into manageable problems. Places like the US, UK, Israel, and others, which were until recently speeding headfirst off a cliff, are now celebrating as cases drop and people can finally let go of some of that pandemic anxiety that’s been going around.

A year ago, I spent a few weeks looking into the infection fatality rate of COVID-19. At the time, this was a minor side-project I could do in the extra time I had saved because I was working from home during lockdown and no longer had a 1.5-hour commute twice a day. It was a fascinating, complex problem, but also relatively easy to attempt to answer based on current best evidence at the time, because that consisted of only a few dozen scientific papers and preprints.

Vaccines against Covid-19 are rolling out across the world, and it’s a beautiful sight. If you had told most scientists this time last year that we would be seeing effective, safe vaccines preventing Covid-19 infection in every corner of the globe within 12 months, we would probably not have believed you. The monumental amount of work required to get us to this place cannot be overstated — it is a truly spectacular achievement.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been fraught with unknowns, from the nature of the disease to broader societal impacts and everything in between. The last 15 months have often been more about the endless cavalcade of things we don’t really understand than the few facts we can be sure of.

There have been many questions we have been desperate to answer during this pandemic. How fatal is COVID-19? What drugs can we use to treat it? If you’re working from home, is there really a reason to own more than one pair of formal pants?