Introduction
Since the onset of COVID-19 as a disruptor of 21st Century life as we know it, this ugly, foreboding pandemic has been a constant on everyone’ s mind. COVID the juggernaut invariably seeps into daily conversations, intrudes on our professional, family, friend, and intimate networks, and leaves us with the need to plan out every facet of our waking experience while this angel of contamination snaps at us like a crazed Rottweiler.
Like it or not, there are so many lessons that we have learned along this journey. Many of us have titanic regrets about loved ones that we would have wanted to see at least one last time. Others have lost money, time, and energy despite their best efforts to cope with a new normal full of compromises and adjustments that may be with us beyond our own lifetimes.
This special report is intended to offer you the opportunity to see this threat through the eyes of the people on the front line of a struggle that we realize was not of our own doing. These experts share insight gained from their long hours, days, and months of selfless, yet often frustrating hand to hand combat with a demon.
We are fortunate to have advocates like these engaged in returning us to a semblance of normalcy. They calm the people who are scared to death as well as the people who wonder what the world that their children and their neighbors’ families will inhabit when the smoke clears.
When our own kids and grandkids look at the COVID-19 era, what will our legacy look like? Was the science an effective tool? Did we do enough to keep people safe? Are we learning from these experiences so that we are better prepared for whatever grand mal calamity inevitably destined to occur?
These are the some of the questions that the experts interviewed for this special report pondered. Hopefully, you will find their responses, drawn from their own frame of reference, insightful and thought-provoking.
Lance A. Williams, PhD Editor
Special thanks to Roberto Vargas, MD Assistant Dean, Health Policy and Inter-Professional Education Director, Health Policy Core, Urban Health Institute, for the remarkable amount of time, energy, and effort that he has devoted to this project. His commitment, like the others who comment in this section, has been invaluable.
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 15