70 Time December 21/December 28, 2020
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 gen-
erous, 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 empa-
thy, 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
FRONTLINE HEALTH WORKERS
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 empa-
thy and hard truths. But there are only so many lead-
ers, 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 pa-
tient, bedside by bedside, by uncounted, often anon-
ymous 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 cov-
erage of the crisis that was gripping New York City.
Martin caught a nearly empty flight to New York,
landed in what amounted to a ghost town—no people
on the sidewalks, no cars on the roads—and made her
way to Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn
to volunteer her services.
“I’[d] never practiced medicine outside of
Arkansas,” she says. “It was terrifying. There was so
much we didn’t know about COVID-19.” Back home2020 Guardians of the Year
During a crisis like no other,
they put their lives on the line
to keep all of us safe
By Jeffrey Kluger