A year ago around this time I was glued to Twitter and Worldometers searching high and low for any horrifying new piece of information I could get my hands on. It led me to a very dark, hopeless place and I'm grateful to have gotten out of it alive.
I still think the messaging of the pandemic in the early going, which led to so much fear and hoarding, was absolutely awful. Not so much because it was vague or unclear, as we knew very little at the time, but because it offered no hope or positive reinforcement along the way. I had to dig deep to find anything about testing improvements, vaccine production or up to date science on immunity. That was supposed to encourage safety, but it only fostered resentment.
These days, the variants still drive a great deal of panic in the media without explaining how t-cell immunity impacts severe illness, but you can find positive developments in the mainstream media if you search a bit and there's a much greater intolerance for fearmongering on social media. Understandably so. Another year of lockdown is unimaginable.