New York | When the pandemic began, Mark Finazzo was working in a Columbus, Ohio, beer brewery, a job he lost to lockdown measures that plunged him, like many Americans, into terrifying months of isolation, anxiety and helplessness, with little more to do than watch the coronavirus rage across the TV news.

Today Mr Finazzo, 35, is in his first semester at Ohio State University. He is getting his second bachelor’s degree, this one in microbiology, hoping to become a research scientist – like the people striving to create a vaccine he watched and read about as he sat on his couch in the pandemic’s earliest, darkest days.