Reflections on the COVID-19 Pandemic

This Blog post represents a partnership between the Women in Medicine Summit and Healio Women in Oncology. An excerpt appears blow, and please find the full length piece at Healio’s Women in Oncology Blog

Author: Amy Comander, MD

Last night, my husband and I did something we have not done in quite some time: We went out for dinner at our favorite sushi restaurant in Brookline, Massachusetts. We had not been there since early 2020! It felt great to have a night out (alone — our children were occupied), enjoy our dinner and reclaim a sense of normalcy. Unfortunately, it was only a sense of normalcy. The first case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was reported on Jan. 21, 2020, and we are now 2 years into the pandemic. (Does it feel longer or shorter?) Our lives have been fundamentally changed.

As of March 6, there have been 6 million deaths around the world and nearly 1 million deaths in the U.S. In the U.S., this represents the death of about 0.3% of the entire population, or one in 340 people. In the U.S., there are just more than 600,000 deaths from cancer each year.

Although COVID-19 cases from the omicron wave are thankfully sharply down in Massachusetts, daily deaths still exceed 1,000 people per day nationally. The loss of lives during this time is incomprehensible. Still, it does feel as if our world is opening again. But what happens next? How do we return to “normalcy?” What will be our next chapter?

About the author: Amy Comander, MD, DipABLM, is director of breast oncology and survivorship at Mass General Cancer Center in Waltham and at Newton-Wellesley, the medical director of the Mass General Cancer Center in Waltham and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. (Twitter: @DrAmyComander)