Earlier this morning, I emailed my colleagues marking the completion of a year since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared coronavirus to be a global pandemic.
Sending that email is consistent with how I behave: I mark the passing of time, whether it is birthdays or deaths or, yes, even the awful pandemic.
Even as we struggled with the pandemic, here in Oregon we also had to deal with unprecedented fires and smoke, and snow/ice storms that triggered power outage also. And, oh, I am also waiting for the final layoff decision, which could send me into premature retirement.
No wonder I am anxious all the time, and panicky quite a bit.
But, hey, I am alive. Beats the alternative, right?
Like millions around the world, I am waiting for my turn to get vaccinated. A year ago, when the pandemic forced us to learn about a whole bunch of epidemiology, experts suggested that a vaccine might be not available for a while, and that it might take 18 to 24 months.
The reality has turned out to be much, much rosier than that. Scientists set out to develop a vaccine well before WHO's announcement, and as soon as the coronavirus structure was figured out. As I noted in this post about the Turkish immigrant scientists in Germany who developed the vaccine that Pfizer markets and distributes:
BioNTech began work on the vaccine in January, after Dr. Sahin read an article in the medical journal The Lancet that left him convinced that the coronavirus, at the time spreading quickly in parts of China, would explode into a full-blown pandemic.
They began the work in January of 2020!
If not for the scientific advancements, the past year would have been even more disastrous for humans. Beyond our wildest imaginations!
Now, a year after WHO's determination that it was a pandemic, a summer of near-normalcy seems within reach.
Wait for your turn to get jabbed.
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