Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it, and good health and good cheer to all — we could all use a little cheer as 2020 draws to a close.

The past year has been one of constant and crucial health news, and I’d like to end it with a huge shout out to the researchers and scientists — all 358 of them — who shared their knowledge and expertise in The Conversation Canada’s health stories this year. They helped us understand the pandemic and all of the ways it affected our lives in 2020, and people clearly wanted to read what they had to say. We published 262 health stories in just under a year, and those stories were read more than 10 million times. Ten million!

The year 2020 turned us all into armchair epidemiologists, virologists and immunologists. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, a vast number of people who normally don’t brush up on those topics found themselves learning about the characteristic structure of a coronavirus, and what zoonosis is, and how pathogens spread and, eventually, about how vaccines work.

Some highlights include a historian's take on what we can learn from past pandemics, a look at how minks could influence viral mutations, a warning about spending lockdown on the sofa and an explainer about what clinical trial reports tell us about the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.

It’s been a heck of a learning curve.

Perhaps it shows where our priorities lie that out of all of The Conversation Canada’s coronavirus coverage, the two most-read stories answered questions about face masks and about when we might be able to go back to what we used to call normal. Catherine Clase, Juan Jesus Carrero and Edouard Fu’s FAQ about how cloth face masks can stop a tiny virus helped people learn how to protect the people around them, and Catharine Chambers’ story about when the lockdowns and restrictions might end helped people understand the challenges ahead.

The pandemic has commanded attention for most of the year, but there were other worries, too. Like Leishmania, a flesh-eating parasite. It’s a tropical bug, so it might not seem like an imminent risk, but Victoria Wagner, Christopher Fernandez-Prada and Martin Olivier described how the parasite has been hitching rides to North America from warmer climates — on dogs! And then there’s the looming danger of antimicrobial resistance. As Lori L. Burrows explained, the threat of drug-resistant superbugs is very real, and is actually getting worse during COVID-19 because of the truckloads of antimicrobial products used to combat the virus.

Although the year that’s been condemned as a dumpster fire is coming to an end, COVID-19 will still be with us as 2021 begins, and will likely affect much of the year ahead. I’m depending on Canada’s researchers and scientists to continue helping us make sense of it.

Wishing you and your loved ones a happy and safe new year!