Today marks a year since the announcement of the first patient with Covid-19 in the United States.
Over the past year, a patient has grown exponentially to 24 million confirmed in the United States alone – a number that is certainly just the tip of the iceberg, the cases we know.
Birthdays are a time to reflect, to look back and to this experience and to evaluate what we got right and what we did wrong.
We fixed some important things: We have made remarkable progress in the scientific and medical arenas, such as the development of protocols and therapies – both reused and new – for people who have fallen ill. Most notable of all is that we were able to develop several vaccine candidates and even authorize two with surprising speed.
But we also made too many mistakes: More consequently and tragically, the fundamentals of public health, the things that are much easier to do, but not so striking: wearing a mask and staying physically away from those who are not in our home. We avoid the cheap mask that falls off easily, but embrace the innovative billion-dollar vaccine that requires a Herculean effort to develop and distribute.
The truth is that, especially for many of us in the developed world, 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 forward, I am optimistic, talking about medicine. I think that once most of us get vaccinated, SARS-CoV-2 will become like other circulating coronaviruses, an annual nuisance, but not an existential threat.
The United States’ image 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 use statistics to our advantage: we have 4% of the world population, but 25% of known Covid infections and 20% of deaths. Can the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s leading public health agency, regain some of the lost prestige at home and abroad? I believe that with a lot of work and time, it can.
But beyond that, the country will be marked psychologically and emotionally for a long time, especially people who have lost family members to Covid-19, the health professionals who have fought relentlessly – sometimes in disbelief or worse – to care for the sick. , of children of all ages who missed a year of school and struggled to catch up, families who lost income from layoffs or suffered other economic catastrophes, owners who had to close their businesses. The list goes on.
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