Hope at Last

 

With news every day about COVID-19 vaccines moving closer to being approved and available soon, I feel truly hopeful for the first time since March. Even as infection, hospitalization and death rates continue to spiral higher locally and nationally, an end is in sight to the uncertainty and vague anxiety of these past nine months. Perhaps in three or four months, we’ll all feel safe again.

Meanwhile, Toni’s family is optimistic that she has finally turned the corner toward recovery. Intubation was replaced with a tracheotomy, which has helped immensely. Although she can’t talk, she can now communicate by mouthing words to her family on Facetime with the help of nurses (who are so accustomed to working with patients who have had a tracheotomy that they have learned to lip-read). When Toni can breathe on her own again, she will finally be out of the woods (followed by a long rehabilitation, including physical and speech therapy).

Every day since March, the CDC has released local and national statistics on the number of cases and deaths to date (on Dec. 11 in the US, it was 15,474,800 total cases and 291,522 total deaths). These numbers are an abstract, meaningless blur to me. By contrast, even though I do not know Toni personally, tracking her experience through her sister’s reports has driven this disease home to me in a concrete, personal, very meaningful way. She is not a statistic; she is one of those 15,474,800 cases.

The day these statistics stop cannot come soon enough. The day we are all safe again cannot come soon enough.