In disclosing health care workers and Dr. Anthony Fauci as one of the four finalists for TIME Magazine's Person Of The Year, TIME wrote:
The COVID-19 pandemic has put the world on hold. However, anyone deemed essential—like health care workers, postal workers, sanitation workers, transportation workers and many others—had to keep going. They risked their lives and in doing so, saved countless other lives. One of those frontline workers, who spends part of his day doing rounds at the hospital, is Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the most visible scientific leader in the U.S. in 2020.
The cover will be officially announced tonight at 10pm EST.
So we don't know if Fauci was actually named, but judging from the leaked cover, it looks like he's included in the group.
But really, who else could they have picked? (Okay, the readers picked "essential workers" -- hard to argue with that, either.)
Just in my own family, my niece, a nurse, has been standing outside in a parking lot doing covid tests since March. My cousin's kid, a repiratory technician, has been working non-stop for months in one of the hardest-hit parts of Texas. Another relative is a nurse at one of the local hospitals, and they are slammed, too.
Our healthcare system is breaking under the stress of this pandemic. In a time of lean for-profit medicine, they just don't have the resources and staffing to keep up. Years from now, we're going to look back and see a wave of PTSD among the health care workers who lived through this.
