HOW WE SOLVED COVID

The scope and seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic was made real to many in March 2020 when the UK went into lockdown, confining us all to our homes, and preventing social contact with friends and family. Fast forward a year or so and a vaccine has been developed, travel restrictions eased and reunions made possible for our nearest and dearest. But how did we do that so fast, when we've been living with HIV for almost half a century, battled cholera for 200 years and evolved alongside the common cold for millennia?

The answer's complicated. As Dr Kylie Quinn of the School of Health and Biomedical Sciences at Melbourne's RMIT University explains, the trick to vaccines is to look for people who've been infected and recovered. "If you can see that in the population, you can