Inside The CDC's Battle To Defeat The Virus

It's been a long year for basically everyone — and especially for Dr. Henry Walke. For months on end, Walke has been pulling 13-hour work days as the COVID-19 incident response manager at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a job he took on last July.

He never expected the job to last this long. "The scale of this pandemic is mind-boggling, and it's affected all of us — every facet of our work and home," he says.

Walke is heading up the largest and most challenging outbreak response in the agency's history — an all-agency effort involving more than 8,000 employees, working to guide the U.S. out of a public health emergency that has claimed more than 550,000 lives.

The CDC's sweeping COVID-19 response has involved teams deployed to trace outbreaks in vulnerable communities, consultations with hospitals and schools to mitigate transmission, embeds and trainings with state and local health departments, coordinating vaccine distribution, and major efforts to wrangle data from disparate sources to paint a clear picture of the pandemic's trajectory.

For much by the Trump administration, leading to mixed messaging on topics such as mask use, .