A rough roadmap to a COVID-19 vaccine

Nine months into 2020, there’s one question on a lot of people’s minds: “Are we there yet?”

We want to get back to watching weird movies in theaters, eating inside restaurants instead of on the sidewalks, and hanging out with our friends, without that pandemic dread setting in.

Bad news. We are not there yet. But even in the United States, which still has the highest death toll and case count in the world, there are some signs of progress.

In the US, which has relegated contact tracing efforts to the sidelines, and whose testing program is a muddled mess, most of the focus is on finding a vaccine. It’s where a lot of people have pinned their “are we there yet” hopes. “When we have a vaccine” is also when people hope they can put down...

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