COVID-19 and the Mu Variant

Greek alphabet soup

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash

At the beginning of this pandemic, I was working at an Emergency Room in New York City. Most people will remember NYC in April 2020 as an early epicenter of the disease whose devastating story served as a wakeup call to the Western hemisphere.

Thinking back to that time is incredibly strange as there were dynamic fluctuations between the denial that we might be overreacting and the fear that we weren’t. The possibility of a lockdown was looming on the horizon and my work meetings included topics such as portable morgues and mask maintenance. These topics were unimaginable even days before they came up.

As at-risk employees struggled with how to move forward, I remember one conversation with one of the leaders at my hospital about what would happen if one opted to work remotely or, in the worst-case scenario, leave their role. The question that came up was, “Even after cases go down or a vaccine is found, the virus will mutate, and what will happen then? This might never end.”

Photo by Clay LeConey of the outside of Lenox Health Greenwich Village on Unsplash

These questions are some that we are at the point of grappling with now more than ever. We are living in a post-vaccine world which is something…