The stages of pandemic emotion: from horror to hope to rage — and now, an anxious optimism
The first days of summer this year saw Americans jubilant, as Covid-19 cases plummeted across the country. The sentiment morphed to anger as the Delta variant exploded, and as vaccine holdouts prolonged the pain of the pandemic — and then to despair, that even with remarkably protective shots, some communities with low vaccine coverage endured their worst stretches of the crisis.
Now, with trend lines heading in the right direction, we’re moving toward a kind of timid optimism.
