While there were many tumultuous times that defined the experience of living in 2020, it's pretty obvious that the big, scary elephant in the room was and continues to be the COVID-19 pandemic. And while its potentially lethal effects had a lot to do with that, it also seemed that the more we learned about the coronavirus, the more concerning it became.
Because while it's hardly the first deadly disease the world has had to deal with, few before it have been as easy to spread to others without realizing it.
And the virus' grim outlook wasn't helped by the fact that by the summer, it became increasingly clear just how severely some people can be affected. Between the potential to experience symptoms for months at a time and the brain issues that can develop as a result of infection, we learned a hard lesson that COVID-19 was somehow even worse than we thought.
And while the research on this phenomenon among COVID-19 patients is still fairly scarce, we are starting to see studies that confirm the virus' most debilitating effects and give us a sense of how long dealing with "long COVID" can really take.