write an essay on "catastrophic 2020". please make it really long
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One feels reckless nurturing hopes for 2021. If John McCain were here, the late Republican senator from Arizona would no doubt say farewell to 2020 with one of his favorite lines: “It’s always darkest before it gets pitch black.” After the year the world has just endured, wouldn’t low expectations be more prudent? A year that began with a failed impeachment and ended with a failing soft coup. A year in which Depression-level unemployment coexisted uneasily alongside a booming stock market. When a virus fractured our daily routines and politics and — in one way or another — broke a lot of hearts.
And like gum on the nation’s shoe, 2020 looks determined to stick around. The pandemic, it seems, will get worse before it gets better. The economy is making some weird noises under the hood. The stock market is as fizzy as cheap champagne, full of bubbles threatening to go pop. Not to mention the president, stomping his foot on an empty ballfield, demanding do-overs.
Yet the big story of 2021 could be a very hopeful one. This will be the year of the coronavirus vaccines, the vaccines that we have in hand and possibly others in the research pipeline. Though delivery of these scientific wonders is off to a predictably slow start, there is an $8 billion jolt coming via the new covid relief package, and President-elect Joe Biden has laid down a marker to deliver 100 million doses in his first 100 days. The end of the pandemic, in other words, is a matter of when, not if.
Covid-19 won’t be entirely eradicated in 2021, but the tables will turn. We know this from experience, for these vaccines are just as effective as the vaccines that tamed smallpox, polio and measles. In the coming year, the cloud of grief, frustration, resentment and even helplessness bred from the pandemic will lift. That’s the promise of a 90 to 95 percent effective vaccine. Arm by arm, syringe by syringe, it corners a virus and traps it there. The numbers will be astonishingly large: billions of doses eventually, around the world. But the arithmetic of eradication is straightforward.
There likely will be problems of production and distribution, continued resistance to basic public health measures, and further spread of conspiracy theories cynically fomented by enemies foreign and domestic. Without a doubt, there will be sorrow — oceans of it — for those who will die of covid-19 before the end is reached. Still, no matter how poorly the pandemic is handled in the United States and across the world this winter, by next winter things will be better. That’s vaccination math. We might even emerge from this ordeal having learned a few lessons about public health and responsible leadership that will make us better prepared for the next emergent pathogen, foreseeable but unforeseen.