You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

Hey everybody, Emily Quang here with Maddie Safaya. Hi Maddie. Hi Emily.

So last week marked one year since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic.

COVID-19 cases in more than 100 other countries are rising. Here in the US a thousand people are now

confirmed with the virus at least 30 have died. Dr. Anthony Fauci told Congress today it's going to get worse.

In the US those first reported cases were on the West Coast and soon we have the outbreak in New York.

Medical staff have been describing warlike conditions in hospitals. More than 6,000 people have died throughout New York state.

Most of them in New York City. The start of this pandemic was so painful and I remember wondering how bad it was going to get.

And then the virus started to pop up everywhere. And at that time we didn't really know that much.

Like that's right. How people even got the virus. We're still working out how much is it by human human transmission and how much is it by surface.

How deadly it would become, what all the symptoms were.

Yeah, in the early months we were learning so much so quickly but also not quickly enough. If that makes any sense.

It does. I mean we really have learned a lot over this last year at tremendous cost.

And so I think one way to honor that loss is to reflect on those lessons and actually make use of what we've learned.

Emily, we are not done with this pandemic yet. Nope. So today on the show we look back at this last year and talk about some of the big lessons we've learned along the way.

This is shortwave the Daily Science podcast from NPR.

Okay, Emily, we have learned way more than we can cover in one show. So today we're going to focus on three areas.

How people get it? Who's getting it and what this disease looks like because our understanding of those has changed a lot over the last year.

It has. Okay, let's start with how people get it. Tell me about that.

Sure, so I talked with Lindsey Mar about this because she studies how viruses behave in the air. She's a professor of civil and environmental engineering, average in the attack.

And she described our understanding of transmission in the beginning of the pandemic like this.

There was a lot of I think attempt to keep people from panicking and so to kind of downplay the spread of it and to really focus on transmission at close contact.

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