Call me crazy, but I’m feeling a little optimistic as we wrap up this week. It was impossible not to feel emotional watching delivery trucks pull up to hospitals and wheel out cases of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to be administered to the health care workers who have been putting themselves at risk for the last 10 months. If you didn’t feel so inspired, let me recommend watching one set to ESPN’s NBA theme. (But really, has no one out there dropped in “Eye of the Tiger” as background music?)

If this pandemic were a movie, we’d be approaching the denouement phase. We’d have a montage of people lined up for jabs in the arm, and maybe even some slo-mo video of people walking away, ripping off their masks, and pumping their fists in the air. As the credits rolled, we’d see people coming out of their houses and hugging their neighbors, shots of bustling town centers, and of kids pouring out of school buses and running into their teachers’ arms. 

This ain’t a movie. At best, we’re headed into the final act of this dark drama. The photos and videos of people getting vaccinated stand in contrast to the grim reality of full ICUs and unfathomable daily death tolls. In a movie, a vaccine or cure would be available everywhere at the same time. In reality, we know it’s going to take months to get enough people vaccinated even if everything goes flawlessly.