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Hi and welcome to COVID Quickly, a new scientific American podcast series.

This is your fast track update on the COVID pandemic. We bring you up to speed on the science behind

the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease. We demystify the research

and we help you understand what it really means. I'm Tanya Lewis and I'm Josh Fishman

and we are scientific American senior health editors. Today, after a whole awful year of COVID,

we're going to talk about what we did wrong and what we've learned to do right.

We'll also be correcting an idea that the new Johnson-Johnson vaccine is second rate

and giving you news about some recent developments in COVID medicines.

This is not a celebration kind of anniversary but we're at the one-year milestone of the pandemic.

This week is the one-year anniversary of when the World Health Organization first called COVID

a pandemic. This time last year, the world was going into lockdowns, borders were closing and

cities became ghost towns. Now we've lost more than 2.6 million people worldwide to this awful disease,

including more than half a million in the US alone. I wrote a story about some of the biggest

mistakes in the US pandemic response from not taking the virus seriously to confusing or inaccurate

mask guidance to failing to protect our most vulnerable people, whether it's the elderly,

essential workers or people of color. These mistakes cost us hundreds of thousands of lives.

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