A critical care doctor on what comes next.
 | By Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer |
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If you’re at all like me — and maybe you’re not! — you’re spending a lot less time thinking about the fact that we’re in the middle of an era-defining pandemic than you were, say, a month ago. |
It’s hard to say what changed, exactly. Maybe it was the multiple violent deaths of black people at the hands of police officers and their dramatic aftermath. Maybe your workplace, too, has experienced an internal protest; those can be distracting, or so I’ve heard. Or maybe you can just get used to anything, including a new and briefly novel form of existential dread. |
I’m Alicia — I’m the editor in Opinion who oversees our culture coverage, and I thought about that strange sense of disconnect when reading Daniela Lamas’s Op-Ed about the shuttering of her hospital’s coronavirus unit. |
Daniela is a critical care doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who’s been giving us a firsthand perspective on multiple aspects of treating the coronavirus, from the particular loneliness of Covid-19 deaths to the harrowing ethical choices required of medical professionals in these circumstances. |
Today, her piece is about what should, in theory, be a happy occasion: The specialized unit her hospital set up for Covid-19 patients is finally empty. But, she writes, “I am not sure how to feel about what comes next.” Almost 1,000 Americans a day are still dying from Covid-19; new cases are turning up everywhere from Arizona to Beijing. |
“I feel only exhaustion and dread, knowing what comes next — isolated deaths, terrible FaceTime goodbyes. I had believed that the hard-won knowledge of those of us in hard-hit places like New York City and Boston would begin to spread as efficiently as the virus, but now I am not so hopeful,” Daniela writes. |
Daniela’s accounts have been so powerful in part because of their intimacy — and so it’s also worth making time, if you haven’t already, for this piece by Ron Suskind that ran over the weekend. You can read the thoughts of 40 physicians who’ve also been on the front lines, reflecting in conversation with one another on everything from how the virus is still being underestimated to their struggles to retain their humanity amid the onslaught of death. |
Because if you are like me, maybe you could use a sharp reminder of how little has really changed since last month, and how vulnerable we still are. |
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Here’s what we’re focusing on today: |
Historical Roots of the Pandemic’s Racial Disparities |
Part of the 1619 project, join us on Thursday for a conversation about how this country’s past has affected its present disparate health outcomes. R.S.V.P. here. |
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