The United States will soon pass another grim milestone: a half million Americans dead of COVID-19. But, for a variety of reasons, including increased social distancing after the holidays, the daily count of new cases is declining. The curve is bending downward. And yet—there is always another “and yet” in this interminable story—distribution of the vaccine is not nearly as far-reaching, rapid, or efficient as anyone wants. The Biden Administration is promising widespread vaccination by the end of July, and a kind of normalcy by Christmas. New Yorker staff writer Atul Gawande, a Boston-based surgeon and public-health expert, who was a member of Joe Biden’s advisory board on the pandemic during the Presidential transition. In conversation for The New Yorker Radio Hour, Gawande provided a blunt assessment of the Trump Administration’s disastrous and heedless handling of the worst public-health crisis in a century, but he also offered notes of genuine optimism. Recently, we decided to check in again and see where this fast-moving and mutating virus is going. In the latest issue of