Editors at the Washington Examiner explore how “following the science” would affect our approach toward COVID-19.

It has been a long year since the pandemic began. If you’ve spent these months fretting over the coronavirus and suffering the negative externalities of government lockdowns, it’s time to sit back and enjoy the good news that is finally pouring in.

There is a light at the end of this tunnel, and you can begin to bask in it now, if only you are willing to listen to science and ignore the doomers, gloomers, and anti-vaccine activists in the Biden administration.

Already, the medical profession’s year-plus of experience with the coronavirus has improved doctors’ ability to treat symptoms of COVID-19. The hospitals have not been overwhelmed by a surge of cases they cannot handle. And those states that have largely reopened or loosened restrictions, such as Texas, are not seeing surges of new cases as a consequence.

Even better, mass vaccination has finally taken root. More than half of all adults in the United States have received at least one dose of the vaccine. The nation is just weeks away from making new infections less and less common.

But wait — there’s even more good news. It turns out that everyone has been wrong in holding many of the reasonable fears about how the virus is transmitted. Life might be safer than we thought.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that coronavirus transmission via surfaces is not that much of a worry.

“CDC determined that the risk of surface transmission is low, and secondary to the primary routes of virus transmission through direct contact droplets and aerosols,” a CDC official told reporters during a conference call. The virus, he added, dies “rapidly” on porous surfaces.

That is, you don’t need to disinfect aggressively every surface that someone may have touched or breathed on.

This is especially good news because the constant sanitizing of every surface has been a source of great hassle and expense for many enterprises.