Last year on this date, I published a Tyee article about the fifth anniversary of the first public announcement of what we now know as COVID-19.

My conclusions then were that we hadn’t learned much from the experience. A year later, many of us have unlearned the value of vaccination. Outbreaks of measles and whooping cough have predictably followed. Alberta has stopped reporting COVID-19 in hospitals.

But looking back over the past year, I can see that some of us have learned a lot. For example, a Toronto hospital is now helping patients pay their rent, giving them a financial “vaccination” against eviction and homelessness — conditions known to produce bad health outcomes.

We’re also learning, for example, how such viruses can spread through the air, and what their long-term impacts can be on us and our children — not to mention our politics.