Today marks one 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 24 million confirmed in the US alone – a number that is certainly just the tip of the iceberg, the cases we know about.
Anniversaries are a time to reflect, to look back on this experience, and to evaluate what we did well against what we did wrong.
We have some great things good: We have made remarkable progress in the scientific and medical fields, such as the development of protocols and therapy – both reused and new – for people who have fallen ill. Most notable of all, we managed to develop several vaccine candidates and even authorized two with astonishing speed.
But I did too many things wrong: The most important and tragic basis of public health, the things that are much easier to do, but not as bright: wearing a mask and staying physically away from those who are not in our household. We avoided the cheap mask that easily slips, but we embraced the revolutionary 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 save us – but it cannot save us from ourselves; our own human nature. And our human nature is not good at dealing with what it cannot see.
Looking ahead, I’m optimistic, medically speaking. I think 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.
However, the image of the United States as a public health leader has been tarnished by the events of the past year 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 US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the country’s leading public health agency, regain some of the prestige it has lost domestically and abroad? I think with a lot of work and time, it is possible.
But beyond that, the country will be psychologically and emotionally scarred for a long time, especially people who have lost family members because of Covid-19, health workers who have fought tirelessly – sometimes in the face of unbelief or more. bad – for the care of the sick, 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, landlords who had to close their businesses . The list goes on.
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