Frontline health workers
HUMAN BEINGS DON’T ALWAYS DO SELFLESSNESS WELL—AND IN SOME RESPECTS, THERE’S NO REASON WE SHOULD. We’ve got the one life, the one go-round, the one chance to work and play and thrive and look after ourselves and our own. That doesn’t make for a generous, self-denying species; it makes for a grasping, needy, greedy one. And that’s exactly how we behave. Until we don’t.
Evolution may code for self-interest first, but it codes for other things too—for kindness, for empathy, for compassion. There’s a reason we rise up to defend the suffering, to comfort those in sorrow, to gather in the sick and afflicted. And this year—as the coronavirus pandemic burned its deadly path around the world—we’ve risen and comforted and gathered in ways we rarely have before.
The global mobilization to defeat the pandemic has been led by doctors, policymakers, heads of state and more—most notably in the U.S. by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been a face and voice of gentle empathy and hard truths. But there are only so many leaders, and a widely available vaccine remains months away. Since COVID-19 first appeared last December in Wuhan, China, this has thus been a more personal, more intimate effort, one conducted patient by patient, bedside by bedside, by uncounted, often anonymous caregivers: pulmonologists, EMTs, school nurses, home health workers, nursing-home staff, community organizers running testing sites, health workers from regions where case counts were low who packed up and raced to places the pandemic was spiking.
“I’ve gotta go,” 44-year-old pulmonologist Dr. Rebecca Martin of Mountain Hope, Ark., recalls thinking back in the spring as she watched media coverage of the crisis that was gripping New York City. Martin caught a nearly empty flight
