Stop celebrating, the pandemic isn’t over
It’s like drinking hemlock just as you can see Superman flying faster than a warp-speeding bullet to save you. It’s like losing 39 of the 40 pounds needed to fit into that wedding dress and then deciding to binge-eat whole pecan pies for a week.
Vaccines are on the way, but don’t toss out those masks.
You’ll need ’em for a good-sized chunk of 2021.
Can we talk a little bit about the next few months?
There really is an end in sight, but we seem to be making some odd choices.
The vaccines will trickle out slowly and then begin to gush. By March, April and May, there should be 150 million doses a month available, according to Moncef Slaoui, the chief science adviser to the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed.
The Pfizer and Moderna formulations are doublepunch inoculations, so you have to divide those numbers by two, but they’re still impressive. Slaoui likes his skies extra blue, but if he’s even close to right, we could be resuming a lot of our normal activities, safely this time, by next summer.
That said, there are some unknowns. How durable (long-lasting) is the immunity? How complete is the protection? (We hope for sterilizing immunity in which the immunized person will not suffer an expression of the disease nor asymptomatically transmit it to someone else.)
What happens if there’s a wave of what look like sideeffects? (When you vaccinate 100 million people, lights will start to blink on the dashboard just because a population that size contains people who were, no matter what, going to have heart attacks or transverse myelitis or whatever.)
Maybe the biggest question: how many people are going to refuse the vaccine? This week three old geezers named Clinton, Bush and Obama said they would get vaccinated, to set minds at ease. It will probably take more than that.
So, yes, there will be worms in some of them apples, but America is on the road to apple pie.
We are about to become beneficiaries of one of the most stunning accomplishments in the history of medical science. In the space of a year, we’ve identified a disease, named it, sequenced its genome, learned about treating it and — it seems — made several types of vaccine that work against it.
Next, we’ll vaccinate the whole world. I don’t know what to compare that to. For it to be any more Hollywood, Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum would have to fly up to the Coronavirus Mother Ship and give the virus a virus.
But here’s where our choices get weird.
We’re days from the first immunizations, weeks from when the numbers get big and scant months from a workable safety net.
What did we do at such a moment? Break our bubbles and break out the bubbly. Fly all over the country. Fully nationalize the disease. Gather indoors for irresistibly dry turkey and marshmallow yams. Spread the disease we are about to eliminate.
It’s like drinking hemlock just as you can see Superman flying faster than a warp-speeding bullet to save you. It’s like losing 39 of the 40 pounds needed to fit into that wedding dress and then deciding to binge-eat whole pecan pies for a week.
You can take all those ironies and then cube them for the doctors and nurses and other health care workers who are staggering under the weight of battle fatigue, constant danger and the psychic toll of fighting a terrible war that nobody sees.
The pandemic is like Katrina, if it happened in all 50 states but could never be shown on TV.
Most of these frontline workers are exhausted and in shock but will make it over the finish line if they start getting vaccines later this month.
So what did we decide to do? Double and triple their caseloads with reckless behavior.
You don’t celebrate your Super Bowl win at the end of the third quarter, but we’re acting like that’s possible.
Wear those masks. Keep that distance. Wash those hands. Some time around Labor Day, we’ll hold parades for all those health care workers and for the people who rang up our groceries.
We’ll bow our heads in sadness for the people who didn’t make it and the people struggling with its longterm effects. Maybe we’ll take a moment to reckon with the way people of color and people without money were so over-represented in the casualties.
And even then, some of us won’t throw away our masks. Did you hear about the flu season this year in the Southern Hemisphere, where everybody is upsidedown and the flu comes in March due to all the blood rushing into their heads?
It didn’t happen. There wasn’t the usual flu season. We’re learning. Maybe.