Physicians, nurses, residents, and students writing on KevinMD during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, most of it in real time between March 2020 and 2022: the first weeks and the shortages, the surge, redeployment, schools and masks, the vaccine's arrival and the people who refused it, and what the years did to the people who worked through them. This archive is a primary record of what clinicians wrote as it happened, and more of it was written anonymously than any other subject on the site. For that record organized as a timeline, with the disagreements recorded as physicians made them, see COVID-19: what physicians wrote as it happened. For what physicians said about burnout in those years and since, see Physician burnout: what physicians say, in their own words.
If you’re like me, you mark life’s timeline by three milestones—before COVID, during COVID, and after COVID. While most of us no longer wear masks or maintain social distance, the world has undeniably changed in ways that impact health care communication among its three essential participants: doctors, patients, and nurses.
Since June 2022, the U.K. has been carrying on an inquiry, still ongoing two years later, into the response to and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, hoping to learn lessons that could be useful in the future.
Here are a few of its revelations.
Matt Hancock, health secretary to Boris Johnson, prime …
A bunch of symptoms, which may persist many months or even years after an acute COVID infection has cleared, have been described in the medical literature with increasing frequency since the onset of the pandemic. This constellation of findings has been dubbed “long COVID.” Long COVID’s effects on the brain, in particular, have certainly been in the news, and it’s also been popping up in the medical literature. So, what’s …
Springtime. Blooming trees. Green grass. Cool winds. Sunny skies. COVID.
That is where my mind wanders every year since 2020, when the season turns. I flash back to the drive between the hospital and my home. Every evening after fighting a losing battle at an academic institution hell-bent on ignoring and downplaying the horror that was about to breach our borders. I was a fighter then — maybe more in that …
Has a highly fatal SARS coronavirus already been discovered? Maybe yes, but just its report is highly concerning. On January 4, 2024, a letter to the editor was uploaded to a preprint server which gave too few details but described a 100 percent fatal virus in genetically modified mice. The modifications made these mice similar to humans by adding a human ACE2 receptor to their cells, including in …
I recognize your anguish. Long COVID is new, and I will do my best to support you through this new and confusing illness. This is all I wanted to hear in my countless doctor’s visits. Some came close. The rest were baffled, given how healthy I was prior to a “mild COVID” infection.
I felt patronized by my own colleagues for trying experimental therapy. When activities of daily living are a …
Do masks prevent COVID-19 infections? You might be thinking that it is a bit late to ponder these questions. But better late than never! As shown in the following graph provided by the CDC, COVID is here to stay with us, at least for the time being. Even though nothing compared to the 140,000 hospitalizations per week during the early 2022 wave, there were still about 40,000 weekly hospitalizations a …
Join Shan Liu, an emergency physician and co-author of Masked Hero: How Wu-Lien Teh Invented the Mask and Ended an Epidemic. Discover the journey of Wu Lien-teh, Shan’s great-grandfather, who played a pivotal role in ending a …
Psychological distress.In 2021, 40% of high school students felt sad and hopeless, 20% seriously considered suicide, and 10% attempted it, with suicides among young people hitting their highest rates ever, though they fell in 2022. Since the greatest increase was before 2017, we can’t really blame the pandemic. And some “innovative” approaches for combatting …
Much has been written on the social divides laid bare and amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Thankfully, the more divisive punditry and polemics have receded along with the COVID-19 mandates. And yet, as professionals in health care who have worked in direct patient care and in support of our clinician colleagues, we still see a broad gap separating the culture and worldviews of the people in health care and the …
I’m making morning rounds on the pediatric unit today: First up, 4-year-old twins with a severe asthma flare; next an infant with bronchiolitis on supplemental oxygen; then a dehydrated 3-year-old listless in bed. These children are all hospitalized with viral illness – but none of it is COVID-19. Meanwhile, their sniffling peers fill daycares and classrooms, and my daughter is among them. “Maybe it’s allergies,” I said to myself this …
We sit down with Marissa Lombardo, a cardiologist, to delve into her deeply moving experiences on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. Join us as Marissa shares her journey, from delivering heart-wrenching news …
In this special sponsored episode from Gilead, I’m joined by Anu Osinusi, an infectious disease physician and Vice President of Clinical Research for Hepatitis, Respiratory, and Emerging Viruses at Gilead, to discuss navigating COVID-19 today. We look back on the early days of …
Decades ago, I missed my college graduation ceremony with President Clinton as the commencement speaker because I had to be elsewhere. I was in Shanghai, celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Chinese Medical Association—an organization founded by my great-grandfather, Wu Lien-teh, who was the first Chinese person to be nominated for a Nobel Prize. My father, his grandson, had immigrated to the U.S. from Beijing, met my mother in Palo …
We sit down with Robert Raschke, a critical care physician and the author of One Hundred Prayers: God’s Answer to Prayer in a COVID ICU. We explore the power of prayer in the midst of a health …
No matter your politics or judgment on the COVID-19 vaccine, we can agree that the visuals of the world’s number one tennis player being detained and treated like a criminal when he went to the Australian Open last year were unsettling, and the Australian government should have better handled his case. To recap, Mr. Djokovic flew to Australia in January 2022 on a vaccine exemption as he had a COVID-19 …
On October 28, 1918, a San Francisco horseshoer named James Wisser urged a street corner crowd to throw away their masks in defiance of a local mask mandate issued a few days before. He was shot twice after resisting a local health inspector’s attempt to force compliance. At that time, most of the medical community believed that cotton gauze masks were useful in slowing infection rates, but dissenting …
Join Nicholas A. Daniels, an internal medicine physician and the author of Outbreaks and Pandemics: The Life of a Disease Detective. In this episode, we delve deep into the crucial role disease detectives play in solving and …
I am perplexed by two different needles which, when viewed together, illustrate the irrational themes which dominate our shared humanity. They inform me that, despite being a doctor for more than twenty years, I honestly feel dumber each day about human behavior. If, unlike me, you have somehow figured out more along the way, good for you.
The first needle which vexes me was the one stuck in my arm on …
Kush Kare Hospital in Columbia, New York, was the flagship of Kush Kare Private Equity Inc., a for-profit chain of hospitals across America. A for-profit that was listed on a lot of lucrative trading routes. Clearly its workings were murky—maybe not equity at all. A clever …
