Can scientific uncertainties about COVID-19 be fact-checked?

The coronavirus pandemic and COVID-19 have brought hardships from the deaths of loved ones to economic struggles to social isolation. Everyone has been touched by it.

Fact-checkers went from knowing almost nothing about a strange new virus to monitoring its every effect. In the process, we had to get more comfortable with the nature of scientific inquiry and its constant companion, uncertainty.

Our knowledge has changed and grown over many months. Some of the things we were told turned out to be wrong. The most prominent example is masks. At...