How to beat the pandemic by summer

After nearly a year of social isolation and sacrifice in the long war on COVID-19, the end stage of the pandemic is finally in sight. Millions of Americans are being vaccinated each week, and the number of coronavirus-related hospitalizations in the United States has plunged by more than 40 percent in the past month.

But this final stage will still be lethal—perhaps more so than most people imagine. More Americans were reported dead of COVID-19 on Friday February 5th than on any day in all of 2020. The U.S. is still on pace to have more than 80,000 COVID-19 fatalities a month. Meanwhile, variants of the coronavirus that emerged in the United Kingdom, Brazil, and South Africa are spreading quickly. These variants are more contagious and more deadly than the original virus, and they threaten to stall or even reverse our progress.

“If we don’t accelerate the pace of vaccinations, we’re looking at an apocalypse,” says Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine. “We’ve got to figure out a way to get ahead of the variants to avoid 1 million deaths by the end of this year.”