What does gazing up at the night sky have in common with the COVID‐19 pandemic? Even though no matter can travel faster than light, the speed of the latter is constant and finite, and hence when we look at the night sky, we see stars and galaxies in the way they were in the past, for the starlight that we see at any given point in time travelled for years before it reached us This phenomenon offers an apt analogy to the challenges that we are faced with today, when, amidst the COVID‐19 pandemic, we attempt to understand the gravity of the situation and to plan our responses to it by relying on the available numbers of confirmed cases and deaths linked to the virus Putting aside the fact that only a fraction of all cases is officially registered, this data, just like stars, is not indicative of the situation in the present, but rather offers a glimpse into the past
Looking into the past, living in the future