The coronavirus pandemic and COVID-19 have brought hardships from the deaths of loved ones to economic struggles to social isolation. Everyone has been touched by it.
Fact-checkers went from knowing almost nothing about a strange new virus to monitoring its every effect. In the process, we had to get more comfortable with the nature of scientific inquiry and its constant companion, uncertainty.
Our knowledge has changed and grown over many months. Some of the things we were told turned out to be wrong. The most prominent example is masks. At the beginning of the pandemic, health authorities said they weren’t necessary. They then changed course, and we went through a year of widespread masking to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Most recently, with vaccines becoming widespread, the new advice is that some of the vaccinated can go without masks.
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