https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/12/pandemic-year-two/617528/
If vaccines are successfully distributed, Americans must agree to get them. As of earlier this month, 27 percent said they wouldn’t get a free COVID-19 vaccine, though that proportion had fallen since September.
Meanwhile, some 42 percent of Republicans currently say they would refuse a vaccine; “if Trump was enthusiastic about the vaccination, he could play a remarkably constructive role” in swaying his supporters
Immunity lasts a lifetime for some viral diseases, such as chicken pox and measles, but wears off much earlier for others. There are four mild coronaviruses that cause common colds, and the immune system only remembers how to deal with them for less than a year. By contrast, immunity against the deadlier coronaviruses behind MERS and SARS lasts for several years.
The more people who are infected with the coronavirus, the higher the odds that it will acquire vaccine-evading mutations.
Health-care workers, to start with, “are beyond fatigued,” said Lauren Sauer of Johns Hopkins Medicine, who studies hospitals’ surge capacity. “People have been doing this for almost a year without backup.” Each COVID-19 peak has sapped more energy and morale, and afterward, fatigued health-care workers have had to deal with a backlog of postponed surgeries, as well as new patients who have been sitting on their medical problems and come in sicker than usual. In the current surge, as hospitals have bulged with up to 120,000 COVID-19 patients, nurses, doctors, and respiratory therapists have faced the most grueling conditions yet. They’ve spent hours in intensive-care units packed with some of the sickest patients they have ever cared for, many of whom die. They fear infecting themselves or their families. They suffer the moral injury of fighting the virus while others party, travel, and cry hoax.
With conspiracy theories now mainstream, “we can’t analyze disasters anymore without [asking if] we can even achieve a shared description of the events that are happening,” Knowles, the disaster historian, told me. How does a country learn from its mistakes if it cannot even agree on whether it made any?
In 2019, the Global Health Security Index used 85 indicators to assess how ready every country was for a pandemic. The U.S. had the highest score of all 195 nations, a verdict that seems laughable just one year later.
A living safety net, these workers can intervene early if people need food, medications, or prenatal care. “We [in the U.S.] wait for someone to completely crash and burn before we provide those things,” Davis said. “We are too focused on high-tech and expensive health care. We’re set up to fail in a pandemic like this.”