Michael Mina could have pursued a career as a potter. Or remained a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka. Instead, he opted to become an epidemiologist, a profession that now has his head hitting the pillow around 4 a.m. each day for five hours of sleep. He spends the bulk of his time in his office — or rather, the coffee table jury-rigged into a standing desk in his Jamaica Plain apartment — searching for ways to ease the pandemic’s devastation and fielding a barrage of media requests.
But each week, amidst the thousands of e-mails he receives and the thousands of patients filling intensive care beds across the country, it is not the exhaustion that weighs most heavily on Mina. It’s the dejection.
“At almost every step of this pandemic, we have failed magnificently as a country,” the Harvard scientist said Monday. “And in ways that we just really didn’t need to fail.”