With 2 ½ years of COVID-19 experience behind us, we can now identify the missed opportunities the medical and public health communities had to control the pandemic. There are three well-established areas where the virus caught the world unprepared: asymptomatic viral transmission from the infected to the uninfected; airborne spread from extremely small particles, especially indoors; and rapid emergence of new COVID-19 variants. These unexpected and mostly unprecedented developments thwarted early efforts to control the virus and caused devastating consequences including more than 6.5 million d…