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.
With COVID-19 well underway and impacting everything from the economy to everyday life, here are a few financial planning strategies during a crisis.
1. Understand your budget. During uncertain times, spending usually reverts to a survivalist mentality. This is a good time to prioritize what really matters most. As we’re all staying home during COVID-19, entertainment and food costs have greatly reduced. I know I’m cooking meals and finding …
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Physician financial planning during uncertain times
I am a physician. I have worked hard to get where I am in life. I went into medicine for many reasons. The intellectual challenges. Being in a field with lots of human interaction. And of course to help people. I went into emergency medicine because I ultimately couldn’t decide on a single specialty. I liked something about each one. When I rotated through the emergency department early in …
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In the coronavirus crisis, for-profit health care kills doctors’ spirits
Coronavirus is sweeping across the world, cities are shutting down, hospitals overflowing, the economy crashing, and suddenly your cranial nerve mnemonic feels like the last thing you should be focusing on. But while the world screeches to a halt, medical students are finding themselves in an unexpected limbo, somewhere between the front lines of health care and the shuttered campuses of colleges and universities. For medical students, COVID-19 means virtual …
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What COVID-19 means for all medical students
The front desk staff member who checks you in at your primary care physician’s office is 64 years old with a history of hypertension and coronary artery disease. She unexpectedly became a widower five years ago and is planning to work until the age of 68 to secure adequate retirement savings. She is worried about contracting SARS-CoV-2 from a patient as they check-in despite being vigilant about her personal hygiene …
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Health care workers are here for you. Do your part to keep them safe.
On a sticky summer day four years ago, a class of eager medical students and I harmoniously chimed the Hippocratic oath, binding us to the highest standards and code of medical ethics.
As newly accepted and unassuming medical students, how could we understand the sacred nature of this rehearsed and recited ‘covenant?’
While pledging the words embedded in this sacred vow, we were completely unaware that the culmination of our medical education …
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COVID-19 and the Hippocratic Oath
Since graduating from medical school in 2002, I have seen a disturbing trend in the lives of doctors. For years, physicians have been squeezed from every direction. Insurance companies and hospitals are constantly fighting to remove our autonomy. The amount of paperwork we are required to produce has skyrocketed over the past 20 years, combined with the use of electronic medical records, our face time with our patients has shrunk …
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From a physician to our leaders
As doctors, we know how this disease progresses. We know the prognosis for patients who need to be on a ventilator. We know that if we have a cardiac arrest during the course of COVID infection, our prognosis gets much grimmer. Faced with this knowledge, how do you decide how far you are willing to go to try and survive?
If you had to be intubated on a ventilator, would you …
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How far are you willing to go to survive COVID-19?
I just lost my uncle to COVID-19. I am writing this to honor him because I cannot leave the country to travel to Canada to see him, I could not visit him in the hospital when he needed us the most, I cannot attend his funeral, and I could not tell him in person how much I love him and appreciate everything he has done for me.
He was …
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My uncle’s battle against COVID-19
Nurses are responsible for patient care. They are the ones at the bedside 24/7. There is no one who spends more time with individual patients. They are the ones most in danger in the coronavirus pandemic.
The news gets grimmer every day about the inevitable surge coming across the country. Forecast of death tolls in the 100,000 to 200,000 range, if not higher, is terrifying. If the death toll is that …
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I won’t sacrifice myself when I can’t get a damn mask
We are in the midst of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The numbers are scary and changing by the day and hour. Johns Hopkins University has a real-time dashboard where you can monitor global cases.
Cases in China have leveled off, while elsewhere in the world, cases are on the rise. At the time of this writing, there are about a quarter of a million confirmed cases worldwide …
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Ophthalmology in the era of COVID-19
I miss going to work feeling excited, inspired, determined, frustrated, and exhausted. Being a doctor has been my magnetic north since I was ten, the longest relationship of my life. It’s who I am, what I’m called, how I spend my waking hours, what makes my family most proud of me, and my first love.
Now I go to work terrified. I cannot sleep the night before I am on call. …
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For the first time, my job has betrayed me
With COVID-19 spreading rapidly throughout the nation, we need to work together to save as many lives as possible. This includes asylum seekers who are detained for entry-related offenses.
Asylum seekers are among the most vulnerable groups globally. They are mothers, husbands, and children fleeing violence, poverty, and persecution. With few options, they arrive to the U.S under a human and legal right to seek asylum. As …
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A doctor’s message to ICE: Release asylum seekers to prevent COVID-19 spread
The world is impacted by coronavirus. The same advancements in civilization that allow us to travel and experience new cultures are the very thing that has blurred our borders and made everyone susceptible to the virus. We are observers and participants at the same time.
Schools are closed and shifting to long-distance learning models. Conferences are canceled. Sporting events are shutting the stadiums to fans. We are social beings now being …
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3 tips for inner peace in this COVID-19 world
The world of COVID-19 has two poles: the frontline workers bravely putting themselves at risk for the greater good, exiled to tents in their backyards to protect their families – and the rest of humanity, asked to do its part by staying home.
As a medical student, I have felt somewhat untethered – aligned in training and identity with the former, but relegated to the latter out of necessity. I have …
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We treat self-sacrifice as a currency in medicine
It’s maddening to see the differences in health outcomes between the rich and the poor. Even more unsettling is reflecting upon the psychological pain accumulated when living in a fad-obsessed materialistic comparison-creating society, the postponed dreams, and the day to day compromise that those with less have to endure – thoughts that may be far removed from the ruminations of the those who have abundance.
I don’t mean to stereotype, and …
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Coronavirus exposes the reality of income-driven health inequality
On March 17th, in a nationwide effort to protect our patients and minimize the overuse of critical primary protective equipment (PPE), the most disposable force in the hospital was removed: our medical students.
When I learned of this temporary suspension, I had just finished my first month of inpatient medicine, a defining achievement in the clinical years. My peers and I had endured eight months of clinical rotations, surviving (at times …
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Being a medical student during the COVID-19 pandemic
Ignoring a problem won’t make it go away. I say this all the time, with love and compassion, to my patients who are having trouble accepting a diagnosis. Ignoring your Type 2 Diabetes, for example, won’t make it any less real. It will only land you in renal failure and on dialysis, or with a foot amputation, or a heart attack or stroke. Sometimes, we have to set ego aside. …
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Ignoring COVID-19 won’t make it go away
I am addicted to Facebook these days. Like everyone else, I am glued to social media, riveted by the drama unfolding around me. I read from the perspective of a primary care doctor in Seattle, the site of the first case of COVID-19 in the country. My friends and family send me regular thanks for being “on the frontlines.” In truth, I am not on the frontlines. I am not …
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Don’t praise physicians, protect them
