77
in the pandemic, when the disease had not yet
spread throughout the U.S., Pete Sands— musician,
activist and member of the Navajo Nation—was
working in the communications department of
the Utah Navajo Health System when, as he told
TIME in May, he was talking with the clinic’s board
members. “There was just something that kind of
spoke inside all of us saying, ‘This is going to come
here.’ ” By May, the Navajo Nation had surpassed
New York for the highest case rate in the country.
Sands and the clinic established pop-up testing
sites and—in collaboration with the Mormon
church, the Utah Trucking Association, the produce
company SunTerra and others—provided food and
firewood through deliveries to rural residents and
curbside pickups, where cars lined up for miles as
residents waited their turns.
As caseloads dipped during the summer, Sands
saw trouble coming. “People are gonna feel like we’re
over this,” he recalls thinking. “They’re gonna start
traveling; tourists are gonna come to the reserva-
tion.” And they did, but Sands and his team have
kept at it, continuing their work as case counts have
climbed again, and extending aid to Native Ameri-
can groups in Arizona and New Mexico.the plague will eventually end. The suf-
fering will stop. The dying will stop. There will be
scars—lost family members, broken households,the post traumatic pain of health workers who held
too many dying hands, wrapped too many lifeless
bodies. But the world will come through to the
other side of the crisis—and in some ways already
has. It was China in which the virus emerged, and it
is China where it has been most effectively brought
under control.
Liu Chun, 48, a respiratory doctor specializing
in ICU patients in Changsha, a city in central China,
was one of the first to volunteer to travel to Wuhan
when the virus broke out there—part of a group
of 130 doctors from her hospital alone. Some of
them wept in fear as they set out for Wuhan; one of
them scribbled out his will. “I was a little nervous,”
Liu concedes. “We began to call [the virus] ‘the
silent killer.’ ”
The killer has stopped killing in most of China,
and the coming vaccines should finally end it all but
completely there—and everywhere else too. The
memory of the horror will remain, and of the her-
oism too. In the face of a pandemic that dared hu-
manity to show its best, its bravest, its most self-
less selves, the frontline workers delivered. —With
reporting by AbigAil AbrAms, JAmie DuchArme,
TArA lAw, KATie reilly and FrAncescA TriAnni/
new yorK; FrAncescA berArDi/Turin; chArlie
cAmpbell/chAngshA; AbhishyAnT KiDAngoor/
hong Kong; mADeline roAche/lonDon; and
VASILIEVA: NANNA HEITMANN—MAGNUM PHOTOS FOR TIME; ROTH: STEPHANIE MEI-LING FOR TIME Abby Vesoulis/wAshingTon □
ALAN ROTH
Family doctor;
Queens, N.Y.
Roth saw more
patients die this
year than over the
past 15 years.
He contracted
COVID- 19 in March
and continues
to work despite
ongoing fatigue.