Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Perspectives: We've Learned How Our Nation Reacts To Tragedy; Meet The Doctor Who Invented The Face Mask
Roll Call: P Is For Pandemic — And Other Lessons Of The Past Year
The one-year anniversary of the suspension of normal life because of the coronavirus pandemic offers a reminder of how naive we were in mid-March 2020. When baseball spring training and Broadway theaters shut down on March 12, there were only about 1,300 reported cases of COVID-19 in the United States. That’s why the closures were envisioned as temporary, with the start of the major league season delayed by two weeks and Broadway slated to go dark for a month. How little we knew then — and how little at the time we were able to emotionally accept. (Walter Shapiro, 3/9)
Boston Globe: The Next Pandemic Challenge: Reacquainting Ourselves With Everyday Risks
An invitation is coming, maybe sooner than you expect: a party, inside, with people you don’t even know. Will you react with delight at the impending return of the easygoing closeness COVID-19 has taken away? Trepidation over whether to stretch your late-pandemic boundaries? Disgust at the prospect of a superspreader event, where partygoers spritz one another with pathogens as they belt out “Happy Birthday”? Any of these responses would be normal, given what we’ve been through — and what we’ve missed — in the year since COVID-19 took over our lives. But it won’t be long before social events return to the realm of responsible behavior, challenging everyone to weigh the lingering dangers against other things we cherish. (Andy Rosen 3/11)
The New York Times: I Was An E.M.T. While Covid-19 Devastated New York
One of my most vivid memories from last April is the sound. I was working as an emergency medical technician in New York City. Day and night for weeks, sirens drowned out every other sound within earshot. A doctor told me, “The sound of sirens will be how we all remember this for the rest of our lives. ”But will it? What is our capacity as a nation to remember? To hold and bear and suffer this much continuous loss? In those fatal spring months in New York, the sound inside ambulances conveyed, at least to me, a desperateness even more dire than the wailing sirens ricocheting across the city. The radio spat out emergencies nonstop as 911 calls surged beyond the volume on the day of the Sept. 11 attacks. Dispatchers sent E.M.T.s and medics on back-to-back runs for “sick fever cough,” the new designation being used for patients with Covid-19 symptoms. (Jennifer Murphy, 3/11)
CNN: Dr. Wu Lien-Teh: The Trailblazing Doctor Who Invented The Face Mask
If you visit Wednesday's Google search box page, you might notice that the "doodle" -- the cartoon image that the tech giant wraps around its familiar multicolored logo -- honors an Asian man in a white coat who appears to be making and distributing face masks. The man, as my friend Ling Woo Liu emailed me late last night when the doodle first went live around the world, is her great-grandfather: Chinese-Malaysian epidemiologist Dr. Wu Lien-teh, being honored by Google on the 142nd anniversary of his birth. (Jeff Yang, 3/10)
The Washington Post: For Cancer Patients, Trying To Get A Coronavirus Vaccine Is A Dark Comedy
Cancer patients face life-threatening complications from all manner of infections, and covid-19 might increase their risk of death 15-fold. Yet most cancer patients remain ineligible for the covid-19 vaccine. And the reasons appear torn from a dark comedy. Our family discovered this the hard way. A few days before the new year, my wife, Rachel, was diagnosed with cancer in both breasts. Further tests revealed a genetic condition, BRCA2, which seriously elevates her risk of more cancers. She’ll be spending the first half of 2021 in and out of surgery. Doctors will remove her ovaries, uterus, fallopian tubes and both breasts. She’ll be weak and vulnerable until at least the summer. (Kenneth Osgood, 3/10)
