https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/the-plague-year
During the transition to the Trump Administration, the Obama White House handed off a sixty-nine-page document called the Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents. A meticulous guide for combatting a “pathogen of pandemic potential,” it contains a directory of government resources to consult the moment things start going haywire.
Most polio infections are asymptomatic or very mild—fever and headaches. But some are deadly. The polio cases that doctors actually see are about one in every two hundred infections. Stealth transmission is why polio has been so hard to eradicate.
COVID is unusual in the variety of ways that it causes the body to malfunction
More than twenty thousand New Yorkers died from COVID in the spring. As the numbers mounted, Link noticed that employees were practicing “psychological distancing.” He said, “Our staff had never seen so much death. Normally, a patient dying would be such a big deal, but, when you start having a dozen patients die in a day, you have to get numb to that, or you can’t really cope.” This emotional remove was shattered when the first staff member died: a popular nurse, Ernesto (Audie) De Leon, who’d worked at Bellevue for thirty-three years. Link said, “His death was followed by a COVID-style ‘wake,’ as many of his colleagues approached his I.C.U. cubicle in full P.P.E., put their hands on the glass door, and read Scripture, prayed, and wept. Because of the infection-control restrictions, staff consoled each other without touching or hugging. It was very unnatural.”
The Strategic National Stockpile existed for such emergencies, but Secretary Azar had recently testified to the Senate that it had only twelve million N95 masks—a fraction of what was needed. The storehouse had once held more than a hundred million masks, but many were used during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, and the supply wasn’t replenished.
Baker quietly secured a cache of 1.2 million masks from China, and enlisted the help of Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, who used the team plane to fly the shipment to Logan Airport, where it was received by the Massachusetts National Guard and spirited away.
In 2013, she became the first Black female anesthesiologist to be hired by the Medical University of South Carolina, which opened in 1824. U.Va. hired her in 2018. “Growing up in medicine, what I’ve come to realize is that, should I have a child, it would actually be at more risk of dying than my mom’s child was,” she said. She cited a Duke University study that correlated race and education levels: “If you look at white women with my same level of degrees, my child is five to seven times more likely to die before his first birthday than theirs. It’s been that way historically for Black women. Our numbers haven’t really changed, as far as health outcomes, since slavery times.”
The country, it turned out, was experiencing wildly different pandemics. For every ten thousand Americans, there were thirty-eight coronavirus cases. But, for whites, the number was twenty-three; for Blacks, it was sixty-two; for Hispanics, it was seventy-three. At Hilton’s hospital, seven of the first ten COVID fatalities were people of color.
“Only one in five African-Americans can work remotely,” she said. “Only one in six Hispanics can.”
Masks had become a political litmus test, with many conservatives condemning mask mandates as infringements on liberty, and to wear one in Trump’s White House seemed borderline treasonous. Pottinger was shocked to learn that, in any case, the White House had no ready supply of masks.
The C.D.C.’s sudden reversal, Redfield admitted to me, was awkward: “When you have to change the message, the second message doesn’t always stick.” Worse, when the President announced the new mask advisory, he stressed, “This is voluntary,” adding, “I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.”
I asked Hilton if she was worried about the mass gatherings. She said that she expected a rise in infections. Then she added, “For Black men, one in every thousand is at risk of dying in his lifetime from an encounter with a police officer. If you think about that number, that’s what leads Black people to say it’s worth me dying and going out to this protest and saying enough is enough. Police brutality is almost like a pandemic, a generational pandemic. It’s a feeling—I’m going to die anyway, so I might as well risk this virus that I can’t see, to speak about the virus of systemic racism that I can see.”
governor.”“One out of eight hundred Black Americans who were alive in January is now dead,” Hilton told me.