“The virus in Wuhan turned out to be far more infectious, and it spread largely by asymptomatic transmission. ‘That whole idea that you were going to diagnose cases based on symptoms, isolate them, and contact-trace around them was not going to work,’ Redfield told me recently. ‘You’re going to be missing fifty per cent of the cases. We didn’t appreciate that until late February.’ The first mistake had been made, and the second was soon to happen.” Lawrence Wright’s tour de force in The New Yorker: The mistakes and the struggles behind America’s coronavirus tragedy. The Plague Year.

+ Adding tragedy to the already tragic, the race to vaccinate millions in US is off to slow, messy start.

+ And Ed Yong, who gave us tremendous coverage in 2020 provides a preview of Where Year Two of the Pandemic Will Take Us. From one member of Biden’s task force: “Think about next summer as a marker for when we might be able to breathe again. But there’s almost a year’s worth of work that needs to happen in those six months.”