Some reason for hope

He’d wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning to get to the hospital for rounds, so he could be at his office when it opened. He never took a break.” That was Dr. Carlos Araujo Preza’s daughter talking about her 51-year-old father, a pulmonologist in Texas who had been on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic before he died of the disease on Nov. 30.

“My beautiful, sassy, smart loving Granddaughter has gone home to be with Jesus.” That is how the grandmother of Honestie Hodges announced the death of her granddaughter, whose handcuffing when she was 11 caused a national uproar over policing of Black children. She was 14 when she died of covid-19 on Nov. 22.

It has been a year since the first coronavirus case in the United States was reported. The toll of the pandemic is often recorded with the horrifying numbers — more than 400,000 people dead, daily death tolls as high as 4,000 — and grisly comparisons: more deaths in a day than people killed on 9/11 or at Pearl Harbor, eight times more total deaths than of Americans in a decade of fighting in Vietnam.

That effective vaccines are now being rolled out, albeit not as quickly as needed, and that Wednesday saw the inauguration of a president who has promised a plan of action against the pandemic are reasons for some hope.