people don’t seem to realize just how good we handled the pandemic. Of course, we handled the pandemic awful compared to what we could have done. But in hindsight there’s always a better way.

In early 2020 we significantly altered society, cancelling major events, moving things virtual, and creating new apps and services to handle the pandemic. Then over the course of late 2020/2021 we created more apps and services and developed new technologies to treat Covid-19.

In just 1 year, we created and started widely distributing a vaccine which, while it doesn’t completely prevent the virus, makes it very mild for the vast majority of people. So far, at the second-year mark, over 2 billion people have been vaccinated. Along with monoclonal antibodies and other technology, we’ve significantly lowered the death rate, hospitalization rate, and likely the risk of long covid.

Imagine what an outbreak like this would do in an earlier time. You don’t really have to imagine because it’s happened before - the Spanish Flu outbreak and the Bubonic plague. Look at the population (not raw count because our population is much larger) of casualties those diseases caused. We failed to prevent covid-19 infecting everyone, but with vaccines and modern medical care we have made the infections significantly less harmful.