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.
The Prussian pathologist, Rudolf Virchow, who gave us Virchow’s triad: hypercoagulability, endothelial injury, blood flow stasis also gave us the foundations of social medicine, claiming that “physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor” and should be equipped to solve the pressing social problems of their time. In addition, he argued that politics was indeed “medicine on a grand scale,” assertions that are all the more prescient during a global …
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Reimagining medical education from within a pandemic
When I was a high school student, my calculus teacher stood eager to use her new electronic board. She admitted to doing derivatives for fun on the weekends. I admired the way she looked at a complex math problem and solved it with ease. Even more notable was her ability to motivate uninterested high school students to understand and excel in calculus. We were often more interested in homecoming outfits, …
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In honor of Benjamin Franklin: Choose prevention
Millions worldwide have had COVID-19. The largest obstacle to reining in this virus’s spread is that the range of symptoms is unpredictable, from minimal to severe respiratory compromise with diffuse lung damage and death.
As COVID-19 initially marched across China and Italy, scientists honed in on factors, such as old age, hypertension, diabetes, and coronary artery disease, which placed specific populations at higher risk. Unfortunately, one risk factor has proven to …
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A tale of two epidemics: COVID and obesity
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected almost everyone, whether directly, through the loss of loved ones, or its impact on job security. Business has slowed down in many sectors and has been put into a standstill. It became clear that things we thought were imperative to our lives and functionality as human beings were “non-essential,” and we have somehow managed to survive without them for this long.
There have been …
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Positive growth from the COVID-19 pandemic
How are two-career households with children — let alone single-parent households — going to manage with daycare centers and schools closed, perhaps for a long time to come? What damage will this do to career progression and earning potential if one parent must cut back on work? Will childcare demands inevitably delay or derail partnership or academic promotion?
When I was a young mother — my two youngest children are only …
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Will women in medicine survive COVID-19?
On March 16 — the same day that the nation’s first shelter-in-place orders were announced in the San Francisco Bay Area — a Seattle woman rolled up her sleeve to take the first experimental dose of a possible COVID-19 vaccine.
“We all feel so helpless,” she told reporters. “This is an amazing opportunity for me to do this.”
Also making history that day was Lisa A. Jackson, MD, MPH, physician-researcher with a …
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Bridging the gap between the bedside and the bench in the fight against COVID-19
The motto of the House of Stark from Game of Thrones is “winter is coming.” The meaning is a warning to remain vigilant as there are troubling times ahead. This motto applies to both mental illness and the COVID pandemic. There was a brief time where we saw improvements in case numbers and deaths. People began to see small snippets of normalcy again. It gave everyone false hope that normalcy …
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The COVID winter is coming. The time to prepare is now.
I started my medical training in the late 1990s. This was after the AIDS epidemic; that is to say, by that time, the human immunodeficiency virus was known, and there were already proven treatments. So, for doctors of a certain age, this is the first time we have battled an emerging disease. This has created a torrent of confusion and therapeutic missteps. The gold standard double-blinded, randomized, well planned, placebo-controlled …
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It is overwhelming hopelessness that crushes caregivers’ collective souls
It’s well known that New York City was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring, having been the epicenter of U.S. cases for several weeks.
As I write this, more than 245,000 of my fellow New Yorkers have been stricken, and an estimated one in ten of them have died. In fact, the COVID-19 mortality rate here reached such heights it was projected one New Yorker was dying every …
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The need for on-demand access to medical technologies when treating COVID-19 patients
J.T. is a general internist who completed residency in Atlanta early in the AIDS era. His daughter, R.T., is a third-year internal medicine-pediatrics resident in Los Angeles, and his daughter, D.T., is a second-year OB/GYN resident in Philadelphia. They describe and compare their experiences as residents during a pandemic.
Contexts of the pandemic eras
J.T.: I started residency two years after the first cases of AIDS were reported. We residents had not …
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Residency during the AIDS vs. COVID-19 eras
We sit silently on this precipice—my family, my friends, my colleagues. Time spins. Momentum is building. It is a tidal wave slowly moving towards us. We are fixed in its path of raging destruction. It is our enemy, not each other. Each tick on the clock, an ICU bed filling across the West—an exponential net positive, admissions to discharges—true or celestial. Yet, still the world turns, blissful unawareness in our …
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A physician at the precipice of the pandemic’s next wave
I have a video visit in the pulmonary clinic with one of my favorite patients. I ask her how she’s doing and wave to her husband sitting in the background of the living room where she is set up.
Deborah says, “We’re good. We’re healthy. We are staying home. We miss our grandchildren and have been doing a lot of Facetime. And we get our groceries delivered.”
A wave of relief washes …
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Put your thank you into action: Wear masks correctly and avoid large gatherings
If you’re in health care, chances are you’ve heard one of these statements: “Masking doesn’t work.” “We’re all going to get COVID, so why mask?” Another is “COVID is just like the flu.” Or you’ve even heard, “Those people who died of COVID would have died from something else anyway.” One would think that these were said by people who don’t work in health care. However, these statements were all …
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Why some health care workers refuse to mask and how we can fix it
I really shouldn’t complain. I haven’t lost my housing or job. I have plenty of food and toilet paper, and so far, no close friend or family have died from COVID. That said, this pandemic is hard. In fact, it is exhausting.
During the spring and summer, I gave positive COVID results to a number of patients from my home’s safety, thanks to telehealth. But the reality of telling patients how …
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The long journey of COVID
As the burden of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) plateaus into a perpetual state of public health emergency for 2020, examining the United States’ forgotten epidemic of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) offers insight to a COVID-19 solution. STIs are the long-neglected contagious disease that echo many of the same socioeconomic, political, racial, and structural problems feeding the recursive tragedy of COVID-19. Targeted investments are of critical importance as there is a …
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How the STI epidemic can inform policy solutions for the COVID-19 pandemic
As we continue to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic causing spiking numbers of cases, the scientific and medical communities continue to search for effective treatments and preventive measures. We have clearly established the importance of wearing masks, physical distancing, and frequent handwashing.
As of this article’s writing, there are over two hundred fifty articles on PubMed about the connection between vitamin D and COVID-19. As the research studies are undergoing, evidence …
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Is there a role for vitamin D in the treatment of COVID-19?
It has been a year of change and constants. Shortly after a new year was ushered in, we heard of a virus that was sweeping across China and Europe. We saw the devastation that this virus brought to humanity, people gasping for air in ICUs, no known or reliable means of treatment, lack of medical supplies, and healthcare professionals giving up their lives to save others. And then COVID landed …
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May we all find the peace we search for
Signs encouraging mask-wearing compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic are posted in English and Spanish at my hospital. I was fascinated that a Spanish word for mask is máscara, since “mascara” in English signifies the cosmetic that darkens the eyelashes. While I am vigilant about wearing my máscara, I can’t remember the last time I put on mascara.
While I typically eschew make-up, one concession I make is lipstick when public speaking. …
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Putting on my daily máscara
Amid the pandemic, when the world quieted to the sounds of our own breathing when the stillness of our isolation felt dark, who did the health care workers on the frontlines battling COVID-19 turn to, earnestly and urgently, for comfort and meaning? The artists.
The skin on my face was weathered and raw from my tightly fit N-95 mask and goggles. As an infectious disease physician, I spent my day treating …
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A thank you to all artists on behalf of the health care community
I see you, and I am honored every day I get to work alongside you.
To the frontlines: As the hospital gets busier and busier, I can feel the anxiety. People are sicker than ever with COVID and non-COVID illness alike. Seeing the new diagnoses going up every day and knowing that portends an influx of increasing COVID cases 1-3 weeks later feels like watching an advancing onslaught you are powerless …
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To my health care colleagues in South Dakota
