I lost momentum on the COVID diaries, but today as some people are gas lighting the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic I want to finally publish a couple of posts that I started but never published.
As COVID-19 was raging through Italy one of the storylines that made it back to our shores was the number of docs that were getting sick. The number of doctors who were dying. A scary thought entered my head, in the form of a Twitter poll (it is strange how many of my thoughts are arraigned as tweets)
How many doctors at your hospital will die before you start thinking about heading for the hills?
A. Zero. I’m thinking about bugging out now
B. 4
C. 18
D. Infinity. I ain’t no coward.
I asked the question in a group chat but never on open twitter as it felt too inflammatory. My feeling was that it was less the number and more who got sick. The closer you were to the poor doc on the vent in the ICU the more terrifying it would be. Thankfully Ascension St John didn’t lose any doctors, nurses, or employees. But we did have people get sick. A lot of them.
Early in the epidemic we had an outbreak in the cardiology department. At least 8 of the cardiologists got sick and two of them were hospitalized. I don’t know how the ‘Rona spread through their department, but that gave a sense of how fast the disease could spread without precautions.
The housestaff (residents and interns) were also hit hard. Fully twenty-five percent of the internal medicine residents missed work because of COVID-19.
One in four
Thankfully none of them had to be hospitalized.
Probably another dozen doctors in the department of medicine got sick. A number of them were hospitalized, but no one died. Not because we were good, but because we were lucky.
My father is an oral surgeon and the program director of the oral surgery residency at St John and Beaumont Hospitals. His chief resident got COVID-19 and perished. I was on-call in a hospital full of Covid-19 patients when my dad called to tell me. It was startling and focused the mind. After that I found my self calling old friends just to say “hi.” Kind of getting my personal affairs in order, you know, just in case.
Looking back at the docs that got infected, it is noteworthy that the vast majority of infections were early in the epidemic. They were all in late March and early April. The time when we didn’t know what we were doing. I remember seeing videos on how to take off and safely store your mask between COVID patients.
Those halcion days when we thought we could label patients as COVID and NOT COVID. As soon as that lunacy went away and we just started wearing our mask all the time the infections among the staff melted away. It was a stark before and after experiment, but to my eyes masks worked.