Viewpoints: In Urgent Times, Vaccine-Making Process Can Be Much Speedier; Lessons On How To Get Testing Right

The Wall Street Journal: A Coronavirus Vaccine: Faster, Please
Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are leveling off in hot spots like Seattle and New York. New infections should soon begin to decline, and many parts of the country will be able to start a phased return to “normal.” Yet without a vaccine, normality will look very different than it did before the pandemic. The medical community and the public are hungry for news about vaccines, but accounts of progress have been exaggerated. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and senior member of the White House coronavirus task force, has put into perspective the overly optimistic predictions of a vaccine available within the target of 12 to 18 months: “A vaccine that you make and start testing in a year is not a vaccine that’s deployable.” There is a world of difference between testing a vaccine candidate and millions of people lining up for a shot. Clearly, there is a sense of urgency. What, then, is standing in the way of the rapid deployment of a vaccine? (Henry I. Miller, 4/22)

The Washington Post: 7 Things The Administration Is Getting Wrong About Testing
Over the past week, members of the Trump administration have issued justifications for why the United States does not need mass covid-19 testing. Here’s what they get wrong:We don’t need mass testing to reopen the country. Actually, we do. Reopening depends on our ability to transition from population-wide mitigation — which is what social distancing does — to individual-level containment. That means we must identify each individual with covid-19 and then trace and quarantine their contacts. This requires mass testing. In addition, one of the White House’s guidelines for reopening the country is a downward trend in infections. We can’t know that the numbers are going down unless we have an accurate daily count, which can only be obtained through widespread testing. (Leana S. Wen, 4/22)

Los Angeles Times: This California Town Has The Coronavirus Testing Program We Need 
It’s galling that celebrities, professional athletes and politicians without symptoms were able to use their connections and wealth to score COVID-19 tests early in the pandemic, when physicians and hospitals didn’t have enough to go around for the sick patients who probably did have the disease. For that reason, some people might feel irritated with one Northern California community that launched a large-scale, self-funded effort Monday to test all of its residents, sick or not. But don’t hate Bolinas, the unincorporated west Marin County seaside community in question. This is a case not of rich people bogarting a scarce supply of tests, but of a historically civic-minded community (whose residents are not all wealthy, by the way) leveraging its resources to do us all a favor. (4/23)

The Hill: The Troubling Realities Of Slow COVID-19 Testing 
Many Americans are already aware that, in the initial weeks of the COVID-19 crisis, our nation failed to test broadly. The implications of this grave error will only become clearer with time. Meanwhile, some public officials seem to believe that the country’s testing problems have since been resolved. On the contrary, COVID-19 testing remains a significant and troubling bottleneck. (Dr. Maggie Salinger and Dr. Kathleen Pollard, 4/22)

Boston Globe: Uncomfortably Numb. 
The numbers are numbing. Every day, the grim tallies rise. Not along a steady incline, which would be bad enough, but by jarring, exponential leaps unthinkable just a few weeks ago. After a certain point, do most of us fully register the lives behind the statistics? Ted Monette, Barbara Levine, Fred Harris, Julio Quintanilla, Larry Rasky. Can the will to remember outlast the fear of the moment? Or do we detach, in the interests of self-preservation — or of something darker? (Yvonne Abraham, 4/22)

Atlanta Journal Constitution: Thinking Of The Vulnerable Amid COVID-19
These past few weeks have been unprecedented times for all Americans. The fear and unknowns generated from this novel coronavirus have left many feeling scared, isolated, and alone. With new information and guidelines continually being produced by the CDC, WHO and other health organizations, it is difficult to feel stable physically, mentally, and emotionally. But not all of us have borne this burden equally. In fact, just like many things in America, the impact of this event has fallen hardest on populations that are often afterthoughts in our society: the homeless, the poor, the elderly, the undocumented, asylum seekers, and prisoners. (Marshall Waller, 4/22)

The Washington Post: To Help Immigrants Who Won’t Get Stimulus Checks, An Online Effort Asks People To Give Up Their Own
The emails that have appeared lately in Brandon Wu’s inbox contain words such as “afraid” and “worried” and “please.” They are from and on behalf of immigrants. One tells of an undocumented immigrant from Brazil who has worked for more than 15 years in the country and is now unemployed because of the pandemic. Another describes a 9-year-old girl who has seen both her parents lose their jobs and worry about how they’re going to pay May’s rent. “I’m running out of money and i don’t know what can i do,” reads one of the emails. People are suddenly turning to Wu, a 38-year-old D.C. resident, for help because his name appears on a GoFundMe campaign that aims to do for Washington-area immigrants and their families what the federal government is not: get economic stimulus money to them. (Theresa Vargas, 4/22)

The Wall Street Journal: Lockdown Is A Stress Test For Relationships
The Covid lockdown has been a harsh experience for one of my patients, a young professional woman. Isolated with her family in their second home, outside New York City, she has gotten in touch with her resentment of and dissatisfaction toward her husband. The stress of being confined together has made her aware that he is consumed with his work, has difficulty connecting emotionally, is uninterested in physical intimacy, and is an unreliable father to their two children. She might have come to many of these conclusions eventually, but the pressure of being together 24/7 at least accelerated the process. Being alone together has become a stress test for marriages and other intimate relationships. (Erica Komisar, 4/22)

The Washington Post: Covid-19 Is Posing Serious Questions About Cancer Treatment. There Are No Easy Answers. 
As covid-19 continues its assault on New York, the medical community has redeployed its forces to buffer health-care workers on the front lines. Half of my co-fellows, who were caring for cancer patients at our New York hospital just days ago, have been deployed to support our heroic intensive care, emergency room and medicine colleagues treating patients infected with the disease. Those of us remaining have assumed their clinical responsibilities, sharing the enlarged burden of patient care both in and out of the hospital. We are facing serious, unresolved questions about how to practice oncology in the covid-19 world. (Bobak Parang, 4/22)

CNN: Loneliness Is A Petri Dish For Depression...But You're Not Alone
2020 wasn't supposed to be like this. It was going to be, I told myself, the year I rebooted my life. Less stress and a clearer mind, a better attitude and bigger dreams. Back -- shudder -- to dating. This was finally going to be the year, as Dolly Levi would say, when I rejoined the human race. (Jack Gray, 4/22)

Boston Globe: Massachusetts’ Untapped Pool Of Foreign Health Care Professionals 
Long before the coronavirus pandemic hit, there was already a critical need for medical personnel in underserved communities — and overly burdensome requirements for foreign-trained medical professionals who could be filling the gaps. Now states like Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York are taking emergency measures to ease the strain put on front-line health care workers during the crisis. (4/22)

CNN: Denver Opened Up In 1918 Pandemic To Deadly Results 
Politicians were feeling pressure during the pandemic. Businesses were agitating to reopen and deaths were going down, especially far away from the coastal cities that it had hit worst, first. It seemed time to declare "mission accomplished" and get the economy humming again -- especially with an election looming. It was 1918 and Denver Mayor William Fitz Randolph Mills bowed to business leaders and decided to back off social distancing. (John Avlon, 4/22)