Matt Miller
Praveen Chenna, MD, (right) and a colleague discuss a patient s X-ray at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Chenna is a Washington University pulmonologist who spent the past year caring for critically ill COVID-19 patients in the ICU.
A year ago this week, the World Health Organization made the alarming assessment that COVID-19 had infected people across the globe and escalated into a pandemic. Health-care workers and scientists whose work in any way touched on the highly infectious disease were called to stretch themselves like never before.
A year later, more than 2.6 million people in the world, more than 527,000 in the United States, more than 8,700 in Missouri and more than 20,000 in Illinois have died due to COVID-19. The exhausting battle to squelch the virus and address its many ramifications continues, but efforts to successfully treat the many symptoms of the disease it spurs and to develop vaccines capable of returning life to some degree of normal have been remarka
(Illustration: Monica Duwel/Washington University)
March 11, 2021 SHARE
A city the density of Atlanta or Milwaukee, over a half-million strong, tragically has been wiped from the face of America’s future. Thousands of businesses disappeared, never to return. Millions remained out of work or hardly strayed out of their home, for work or play.
A dose or two of hope, however, arrived near the end of the pandemic’s first year in the form of not one, not two, but three record-breaking vaccines for the dreaded, unseen virus that causes COVID-19.
So where do we go from here, in the second year in these times of coronavirus?