18 Actually Good Things That Happened in 2020

In spite of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a surprising amount of positive news to celebrate this past year. Let’s start with the obvious: 2020 was a massively disappointing year, right from the jump. In January, we learned that 162 billionaires have the same wealth as half of humanity, and that we’d just muddled through the hottest decade on record. Then, February came and the coronavirus pandemic began to touch all of us.

The losses piled on after that: the death of more than 1.7 million people worldwide from COVID-19, record unemployment and ongoing business closures, incidents of police brutality throughout the country, and the death of women’s rights champion and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

But amid all our struggles, there were glimmers of hope in the form of actual good news. (We know, it’s hard to believe.) Below, we rounded up 18 positive things that happened in 2020.