The successes — and bungling — of handling the pandemic VOICES

The way we as a country have handled this virus seems to me to be a combination of individual brilliance and dedication, good luck, and institutional bungling.

The individual dedication of all of the essential workers, the individual brilliance of the researchers who developed multiple highly effective vaccines in record time and the manufacturers who are making and delivering hundreds of millions of doses to the world represent this country at its best.

The action of Mr. Trump and Congress to throw all the necessary money at drug companies — and then leave them alone! — was supreme good luck.

Now, if I could stop writing at this point, we’d have everything to be proud of, or at least, to be grateful for. However…

No one has spoken the truth about this disease, namely that COVID will cause pain and suffering no matter what we do or don’t do. Nobody’s gonna win this war because both COVID and the preventative measures cause suffering. As suffering from one goes down, suffering from the other goes up.

Our nationwide data collection has been catastrophically bad, due to institutional bungling, and we have never systematically gathered data on the costs and damage to the entire population resulting from the preventative actions we’ve taken. The overall suffering could have been minimized if we’d had that data.

And now we’re prioritizing access to the vaccines badly. Of course the essential workers should be first. But then institutional bungling begins anew.

The most important people in the country are those on whom a bright future depends. Who are they? People in end-oflife hospice care? People in nursing homes? People over 75 who’ve already pretty much lived their lives? Do we have reliable data to show that young families, hardworking men and women in their 30s and 40s, perhaps now unemployed, are so unlikely to get the virus or to suffer serious after-effects that they can afford to wait, continuing to home-school their isolated children, while the elderly (which includes me, by the way) go to the front of the line?

Until and unless we have that reliable data, I should be at or near the end of the line, surrounded by politicians and activists.

Robert Todd Shelton