Last March, we didn’t know how the pandemic would play out. But we did know it would last a long time. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

By March 2020, researchers knew that uncontrolled spread would be disastrous.

A year ago, on March 17, I wrote a piece about how scientists were predicting that we might have to social distance for a year or more. Soon I was hearing from friends and family via chats and text. “Brian, I literally don’t know if I can,” one friend wrote me. Their responses could be summarized as, “SAY IT ISN’T SO.”

Being physically apart from one another for so long has been among the bitterest pills to swallow in the Covid-19 pandemic. But it’s also one of the hardships scientists warned early on we’d have to endure.

By mid-March 2020, “I think we