Hello friends and readers, it’s been a while. I wanted to write sooner, but I’ve been in crisis-mode at work since the end of February, when the drumbeat of news about COVID-19 spreading across the Western Hemisphere was growing louder.

At the science museum, we acted quickly and chose to use the coronavirus crisis as a science teaching moment. We moved to develop an exhibition about viruses, and in the course of a week, (an unheard of pace in non-profit years) a small team of us quickly developed, printed, and installed a series of informative panels. The most difficult part of this process was sourcing accurate rapidly changing information from all over the globe (back in February, daily scientific reports on COVID-19 were coming primarily from Europe and China).

Cue the back-and-forth with our on-staff scientists – long-winded explanations about the nuances of viral protein structure, and even more long-winded responses as to why we couldn’t bog our visitors down with those details. The resulting exhibit is about viruses, how they spread, and what’s special about COVID-19 – and you can view it here. We made it available online in English and Spanish as soon as we realized the physical museum would be shut to visitors for over a year while it became clear the crisis was farther reaching than we could have anticipated. If you’ll remember, Corona, Queens, was the “epicenter of the epicenter” of the global coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020. Talk about coincidental nomenclature.

I first sat down to begin planning how I would personally write about and cover COVID-19 at the end of March as if I were a working science journalist. To be honest, as soon as I did, I became overwhelmed by the frightening uncertainties of the virus entangled with the unstable future of my home in New York City. I needed to step back and process the situation before I could write about it without bias. I know many others have felt the same vulnerability, fear, and sadness in the last few months, for a plethora of their own personal reasons.

Even since that moment in the end of March, so much has changed (and continues to, such as recently finding out I’ll be working remotely for over a year while tackling the dismantling of systemic racism within the museum and science fields). But one thing continues to ring true. These last three months have affirmed my conviction that doing what I love – writing about science and how it’s communicated – is more important now than ever.