It has been five years since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-11 epidemic a pandemic on March 2020, 19.
Governments implemented unprecedented measures that subjected 2,6 billion people to lockdowns, effectively keeping them in forced quarantine for months on end.
The virus has led to more than 777 million infections and caused the deaths of more than seven million people, according to WHO data.
The United Nations agency estimates that deaths linked to the pandemic now stand at a staggering 15 million.
The devastating effects of the pandemic are still being felt around the world, but some analysts point to several positive lessons that have emerged from this very dark period.
Elke Van Hof, a stress and trauma specialist and former professor of health psychology at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, describes the lockdowns as "the largest psychological experiment in history."
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Here are the four main conclusions:
Advances in vaccine technology
It took scientists just nine months to develop an effective vaccine to combat the Sars-Cov-2 virus.
And they did it using technology that has now revolutionized the development of immunization around the world.
The use of synthetic messenger RNA (mRNA) has been studied for several years as an effective mechanism for developing mass vaccination programs, but the Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated its development.
Research by Pfizer (USA) together with BioNTech (Germany) and Moderna (USA) has used the mRNA mechanism to make their vaccines in record time, allowing millions of people to receive doses that protect them from the worse effects of the virus.
Margaret Keenan, a 90-year-old woman from the United Kingdom, became the first person in the Western world to receive an approved dose of the vaccine on December 8, 2020.
The scientists who created it, Catalin Carrico and Drew Weissman, won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Dr. Margaret Harris, a public health expert at the WHO, describes this race to discover a vaccine as one of the greatest positive legacies of the pandemic.
"We have witnessed technological advancements at incredible speeds," Dr Harris told the BBC.
"Messenger RNA technology was already known, but now we're seeing it being used to make other advances, including even cancer vaccines," she adds.
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University of Edinburgh professor Devi Sridhar and author of the book Preventable: How the pandemic changed the world and how to stop the next one, says that lessons learned during the pandemic have influenced better detection and identification of new viral outbreaks.
"Our scientific capacity has improved, our platforms have advanced significantly," she says.
"If the question at the beginning of the pandemic was whether we would have a vaccine, now the question is: 'how quickly can we make one?'"
With all that said, there are lessons about how to be better prepared for the next pandemic, she says.
For example, countries "that appeared to fare better were those that had healthier populations before the pandemic."
A new era for education
School closures have had catastrophic consequences for children around the world.
The huge increase in dropout rates and learning delays, at both the primary and secondary levels, remains one of the deepest scars left by the pandemic, according to Mercedes Mateo, Head of the Education Department at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
But despite these negative consequences, Mateo sees a positive change in the way education is perceived today.
"There has been a truly positive shift in bringing the education debate into the 21st century, to re-examine education systems," she tells the BBC.
"During the pandemic, it became clear that the education sector is one of the least digitalized," Mateo explains, with a huge amount of resistance to changing this in any way.
But Covid-19 has forced a move towards more hybrid and flexible education, she says.
As a result, Mateo says that the idea of using the classroom solely as a physical and static space is left behind.
The closure of classrooms has also moved the education sector higher up the political agenda.
Furthermore, for Mateo, the pandemic has also created a greater awareness of the role that school plays in modern societies.
A paradigm shift at work
The waves of rapid job losses and the poverty that accompanied them were some of the most serious consequences of Covid-19.
The pandemic has also led to fewer young people entering the labor market, which remains one of the biggest challenges for the global economy.
One of the lessons from the pandemic period was that employment and income protection policies – such as mandatory furloughs – helped cushion the blow of the slowdown, says Gerson.
Martinez, a labor economist at the International Labor Organization (ILO) and its regional office for Latin America and the Caribbean.
He has no doubt that these strategies have accelerated the economic recovery.
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While the labor market has recovered relatively quickly, the latest ILO report warns that it is losing momentum due to economic pressures such as geopolitical tensions, climate change, and rising national debt.
But perhaps the most obvious workplace transformation has been the shift to remote and hybrid work.
Despite a number of global companies now pushing for a full return to face-to-face work, the evidence on the productivity benefits of a hybrid version is mixed.
Many governments have advanced teleworking legislation, for example, including greater flexibility plus "right to opt out" laws in countries such as Ireland and France.
Furthermore, for Martinez, the technological revolution caused by the pandemic has also brought a "golden opportunity" to increase productivity more quickly, for example, with the help of artificial intelligence that optimizes processes in different industries.
Mental health as a priority
The lockdown, uncertainty, loneliness, fear and anxiety that spread around the world made simply experiencing the pandemic a traumatic experience in itself.
Organizations such as the WHO and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) have conducted thorough studies on the increase in depressive and anxiety disorders and the prevalence of suicidal behavior and thoughts after the pandemic.
However, for psychologist Laura Rojas-Marcos, a specialist in anxiety, stress and depression, the pandemic has affected "our emotional memory and our way of compassion. It has been a turning point, not only in suffering, but also in learning."
She says we are now more aware of the importance of taking care of our mental health, "not as something separate from our body, but something that is completely connected to it."
"People took the opportunity to reexamine their own lives and learned not to take other people, their own environment, and even their own existence, for granted," she adds.
A 2022 study commissioned by the BBC World Service from GlobeScan found that around a third of those surveyed in 30 countries said they felt better than before the pandemic.
Many of them reported spending more time with their family; being better connected to their community and nature, and having a clearer understanding of their overall priorities.
These changes have had a broadly positive effect, according to the data.
The crisis has also led to a lasting, radical change in how psychologists offer therapy with the widespread use of video calls.
This flexibility has allowed therapists to reach out to, for example, Ukrainian soldiers in the midst of war or with clients living in remote areas.
The pandemic has also made us pause and truly reflect on resilience and human compassion, two primary issues that, according to Rojas-Marco, lie at the core of our nature.
The gestures of solidarity were some of the bright moments amidst all this tragedy, she adds.
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