Today marks a year since the announcement of the first patient with Covid-19 in the United States.
Over the past year, one patient has grown exponentially to the confirmed 24 million in the United States alone, a number that is surely just the tip of the iceberg, the cases we know of.
Birthdays are a time to reflect, look back on this experience, and evaluate what we’ve got right against what we’ve done wrong.
We have some great things as well: We have made remarkable progress in the scientific and medical fields, such as the development of protocols and therapeutics, both reused and new, for people who became ill. Most notable of all is that we managed to develop several candidates for the vaccine and even authorized two with astonishing speed.
But we have also made too many mistakes: The most consequential and most tragic is the basics of public health, the things that are much easier to do but are not as flashy: wearing a mask and staying physically away from those who are not in our home. We avoided the easily slippery economic mask, but we adopted the innovative $ 1 billion vaccine that requires a herculean effort to develop and distribute.
The truth is that, especially for many of the developed countries, we want science to rescue us, but it cannot rescue us from ourselves; our own human nature. And our human nature is not good at dealing with what it cannot see.
Looking to the future, I am optimistic, medically speaking. I believe that once most of us are vaccinated, SARS-CoV-2 will become like the other circulating coronaviruses, an annual nuisance but not an existential threat.
The image of the United States as a public health leader, however, has been tarnished by last year’s events and its inability to control the pandemic at home. It is a fact and we cannot turn the statistics to our advantage: we have 4% of the world’s population, but 25% of known covid infections and 20% of deaths. Can the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s leading public health agency, regain some of its lost prestige nationally and internationally? I think with work and time you can.
But beyond that, the country will be psychologically and emotionally scarred for a long time, especially for people who have lost family members to Covid-19, the health workers who fought tirelessly (sometimes in the face of of disbelief or worse) for caring for the sick, children of all ages who missed a year of school and struggled to recover, families who lost income from layoffs or suffered other economic catastrophes, homeowners who they had to close their businesses. The list goes on.
Read more here:
