COVID-19: What Might Recovery Look Like?

The answer may be different for everyone, depending on how they are experiencing this pandemic. Here, we look at how recovery could look from several perspectives. In each case, all of us have a role to play.

• Helping patients recover: On the most personal level, thousands of Americans infected with the virus have already fully recovered, with many more to come. These individuals are uniquely equipped to pay it forward: by donating blood plasma with COVID antibodies to help more patients recover; by going back to work before others can to help re-start the economy; by taking on volunteer roles too risky for the rest of us.
  
• Helping our health workers and hospitals recover: Our health care providers and hospitals are being stretched to their very limits. For them, recovery will mean time to re-charge emotional batteries, re-connect with loved ones and return facilities to pre-crisis operations. They will need our support in every way: appreciation and awards, volunteering and fundraising.
• Helping our communities recover: On this, the experts agree: while no two communities are in the same place on the curve of infection rates, every community can lessen its exposure, and accelerate recovery, by “flattening” its own curve. By now, each us knows our part: Stay at home. Don’t gather in groups.Keep six feet distance from non-family members. Wash your hands with warm water and soap often. Don’t touch your face.
• Helping our nation recover: A true national recovery ultimately will hinge largely on medical innovations – new and effective treatments, a vaccine – now on the horizon. When they come, we will all share in a national responsibility: to make sure those medicines get efficiently and affordably distributed to those who need them; and to get vaccinated in order to protect each other by protecting ourselves.

Recovery will come, and we all must do our part to welcome it.