The Turning Point

As we reflect on the past year, and the essays we have written as the pandemic has evolved, we see how much we had to apprehend, and how much we still have to learn. 

SARS-CoV-2 is going to always be with us, at some baseline level, as we relearn the etiquette of being together, and the process of becoming unafraid unfolds in 2022.

During this time of pandemic, new markets have opened, and profit-driven schemes, legal and illegal, have proliferated, highlighting the gain of a few even while many lost much.

The triumph of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the development of safe, effective vaccines in mere months.  Vaccines are costly and slow to develop, and yet we had two, from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, available within about eight months of the arrival of Covid-19 in the US, each with more than 90% efficacy. That is a remarkable

Pandemic vaccine communication has been fraught with lies and premature optimism as the messengers at the federal level have struggled to provide clear and consistent communication that state and local public health staff rely upon.

How much of our Covid-19 failure was due to our overconfidence, informed by recent pandemics that were not that consequential? Could it have been averted by a more honest reckoning with our vulnerabilities?

The arrival of Covid-19 has shed a new light on obesity, a longstanding health risk.

When might we turn our attention back to the full range of illness around us, and balance the risk from Covid-19 with that from other diseases?

Have we now learned something about how to better perform the ancient public health function of contact tracing so we can do better the next time around?

Why did schools stay closed when we knew that the risk of them staying closed probably outweighed the risk of them re-opening?