What should we be learning from Covid-19?

 What am I learning from Covid-19? I never bought into the array of conspiracy theories that circulated freely. I never put much credence in pop-treatments from bleach to hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. Early on I suspected that had we done what the CDC and WHO recommended in January 2020 we would have been past the pandemic long ago. I now see that was an illusory hope, though I am still sure hundreds of thousands of deaths and debilitating illnesses would have been avoided. With the parade of variants, now up to omicron in the Greek alphabet, I think what we should all be learning is the finite limitations of human knowledge. No, I don't believe we were lied to by science or CDC, only that we may have been overconfident in our human ability to understand and address everything. We are always learning, so should expect what we once thought we knew needs to be corrected and updated. I do believe that the response to Covid-19 should never have been politicized but treated as a significant public health issue, so I am suspicious that politicians posing as scientists or critics of scientists either lied to us or were themselves delusional.

Just an aside about responding to skipping the Greek letter Xi in naming variants. I have no insight into the rationale for that (or skipping Nu), but I seriously doubt it had anything to do with being controlled by or not wanting to offend China. In my days of doing educational research, I often used the statistical procedures known as chi-squared. Chi (pronounced ki) is the Greek letter that looks a lot like the English X (thus Merry Xmas since chi is the first letter in the Greek for Christ). In the chi-squared process, chi was the variable that indicated is a deviation from the expected response was statistically significant.

So, for any of you who have endured to the end of my ramblings, my conclusion is that we all should be learning humility from our global, human experience with Covid-19.