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Long Darkness Before Dawn
The Long Darkness Before Dawn
Published in The New York Times on November 30, 2020
By Donald G. McNeil JrEach week, good news about vaccines or antibody treatments surfaces, offering hope that an end to the pandemic is at hand.
And yet this holiday season presents a grim reckoning. The United States has reached an appalling milestone: more than one million new coronavirus cases every week. Hospitals in some states are full to bursting. The number of deaths is rising and seems on track to easily surpass the 2,200-a-day average in the spring, when the pandemic was concentrated in the New York metropolitan area.
Our failure to protect ourselves has caught up to us.The nation now must endure a critical period of transition, one that threatens to last far too long, as we set aside justifiable optimism about next spring and confront the dark winter ahead. Some epidemiologists predict that the death toll by March could be close to twice the 250,000 figure that the nation surpassed only last week.
“The next three months are going to be just horrible,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health and one of two dozen experts interviewed by The New York Times about the near future.
Read the full story in The New York Times here.
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