Petrie Dish

People who've been working on the front lines of the pandemic reflect on the one year milestone and the loss of 500,000 Americans.

This week's Petrie Dish is personal: Host Bonnie Petrie receives her first dose of the COVID-19 Pfizer vaccine.

Dr. Ricardo Cigarroa is a cardiologist in Laredo. He descends from a line of doctors in the city who have been serving patients there for 100 years.

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina is an epidemiologist at UT Health’s School of Public Health in Dallas. She said there are about 12,000 strains of SARS-CoV-2 circulating around the world right now. One of them — the UK variant — is likely to become the dominant strain in the U.S. by March.

The pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, but it's also stolen our normal lives and our sense of security. How do we go on when pressed under the weight of so much personal and collective pain? This week's Petrie Dish explores pandemic grief and also considers ideas about how to transform that pain into resilience.

Dr. Ricardo Carrion, a virologist at Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio, leads us on a deep dive into coronaviruses, this mutation, and what it may mean for the newly developed coronavirus treatments and vaccines.

Texas hospitals are struggling under the weight of the state's worst COVID-19 surge yet. This month the state has seen single-day records for the first, second and third most confirmed daily cases. Hospitalizations have reached the highest level since July. And the situation is likely to get worse. Rural parts of Texas are being hit especially hard.

A San Antonio mathematician who has modeled this pandemic since the beginning says more than 1 million people could die of COVID-19 by spring.

Dr. Peter Hotez expects two COVID-19 vaccines to be approved before the end of the year, and possibly a half dozen by this time next year. He says he has no preference among the early offerings and will get the first one that's made available to him.

Dr. Céline Gounder is on President-elect Joe Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board. She said tracking the virus’ progression through the country as the number of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths rise is extremely difficult.