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Even with the arrival of lifesaving vaccines, more Americans died in 2021 due to COVID-19 than did in 2020. We’re nearing a devastating 75,000 Texan deaths due to COVID-19 since the pandemic began nearly two years ago. What’s especially sobering is that there is no guarantee that this next year won’t be just as calamitous. The new, super-contagious omicron variant of the coronavirus could put as many as 1 million Americans a day on the sick list by the end of January, overwhelming hospitals and our already frayed health care workers, despite early data suggesting the new cases might not be quite as deadly as earlier incarnations of COVID. (12/31)

This past week, many essential workers have again felt that they are being treated as expendable after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines that shortened the isolation period for people with Covid-19 from 10 days to five — a move many workers saw as a concession to business and a danger to workers. (Steven Greenhouse, 1/2)

Under well-established law, the Biden administration’s vaccination mandates are clearly legal. But the politicization of the pandemic and vaccines makes it doubtful whether the Supreme Court will uphold them. Cases involving two regulations that impose vaccination requirements on workers will go before the court on Jan. 7.One rule calls for employers with more than 100 workers to require vaccinations or weekly COVID-19 tests of their employees. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, created the workplace mandate as an emergency and temporary fix, which can be adopted when “employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards.” (Erwin Chemerinsky, 1/3)

We are entering the third year of the pandemic with a confusing state of affairs. The United States has far surpassed the number of daily covid-19 infections compared with the previous peak last winter, yet many businesses remain open, stadiums are packed and children are headed back to school. News headlines announce that “omicron infections seem to be milder” than earlier variants, yet this could be the “worst public health challenge of our lifetimes.” (Leana S. Wen, 1/3)

Count me in. I’m one of the nearly 2 million Americans who tested positive for COVID-19 over the holidays even though I had both vaccine shots and the booster. Fortunately, I had no symptoms. Like so many others, I was completely shocked to read my test result and felt kind of ashamed. (I swear I had been vigilant and I had no idea how I’d become infected!) When the shocking news arrived, I had been on my way to finish my gift shopping before getting on a plane the next day to see family. Do I really have to tell people? I wondered to myself. Honestly, I really didn’t want to spend the holidays alone, again. (Steven Petrow, 1/2)

In July 2020, I volunteered to be in Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine trial. If I knew then what I know now about the company’s quest for profits, I wouldn’t have done that. As one of about 30,000 “human guinea pigs,” I permitted Moderna to test its experimental vaccine on me to see if it would provide protection from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. It wasn’t clear if the vaccine would work, but it was clear the world needed a solution to this pandemic nightmare that has now claimed nearly 5.5 million lives in just two years. As a participant in the double-blind trial, I didn’t know if I was in the control group, which received shots of saline, or in the experimental group, which received shots of the experimental vaccine. It was only six months after starting the trial that I learned I was among those who received saline. (Jeremy Menchik, 1/4)