As UK death toll passes a grim milestone, just what have we learned?

0n 17 March 2020, the UK chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, said that keeping the number of UK deaths below 20,000 would be a good outcome from the pandemic.

- Devi Sridhar

That number was on par with the number of lives that seasonal flu takes each year, the most deadly infectious disease in Britain until then. Two years in, we've now crossed 200,000 deaths.

What have we learned about Covid-19 in that time span, and what old beliefs and myths from the early phase of the pandemic still persist?

First, Covid-19 is a disease that can also kill young people, especially those who are unvaccinated. The idea that Covid is only a threat to older people is still prevalent. But consider that the US has passed a million deaths, and roughly a quarter of those are in people of working age, that is those under 64. Another quarter are in people between the ages of 65 and 74. This is not a disease that just kills over-80s as the prime minister, Boris Johnson, reportedly messaged: "Hardly anyone under 60 goes into hospital... and of those virtually all survive. And I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff. Folks I think we may need to recalibrate..."