These 2 NY Presbyterian doctors will divest you from any doubt about the continuing lethality of COVID-19

As our elected leaders, mostly Republican ones but some Democrats as well, continue the seemingly relentless push to reopen the country, an effort whose origins lie in an imperative being urged and sanctioned from the very highest levels, most visibly in the persona of Donald Trump, the will to resist such pressure becomes more and more difficult for Americans.

We can understand in our heads that the Covid-19 pandemic has not fundamentally changed in scope; we can see the rising death counts in states that have foregone social distancing to any serious degree, and those that have broadly reopened their businesses for the public’s consumption. But when others around us begin to moderate their caution, when we hear stories of friends enjoying the beach, their dinner at a restaurant, their small get-togethers with close friends, our ability to see the thing clearly-- as it actually exists-- becomes fuzzy and indistinct, like a memory that needs to be tricked into reappearing. The constant stress of lockdown welcomes the type of magical thinking that our governments are peddling, that this is ultimately little more than a very virulent flu, that only the old or infirm are really susceptible, and that our lives simply must return to normalcy.

Our leaders know this as well, which is why you have Treasury Secretary Mnuchin flatly declaring “we cannot shutdown the country again,” and think-tanks for financial institutions opining “We have to get away from the shutdown policy and towards something that is more about risk mitigation.” The sweet relief of reopening the country is a difficult, almost impossible siren to resist, and its difficulty increases each day as millions of unemployed people see their savings dwindling and their bills mounting.

But there is a certain class of people who will not waver in their vigilance: the doctors and nurses who have treated Covid-19 patients over the last three months.

Ron Suskind is a Pulitzer prize winning author, possibly most famous for capturing and attributing the infamous remark describing the “reality-based community” spoken by an unnamed official in the George W. Bush Administration. In an extraordinary opinion piece written for the New York Times,  Suskind incorporates snippets of quotes from forty doctors and nurses working at NY Presbyterian Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.  He used digital platform technology which he had originally developed for autistic people to interact with others, much like Zoom, and provided it to the doctors and nurses he selected:

In late March, each doctor found a trusted colleague and paired off for regular encounters on the platform, called BongoMedia, where they sit, usually at home — their faces side-by-side, like on Zoom — for a 10-minute session guided by preloaded questions that pop up on the screen every few minutes: How are You Feeling? What Do You Fear? What Are Your Hopes?

And after a while, the doctors and nurses so paired up on this digital platform began to share their stories about treating Covid-19 patients. Measures were also added to ensure anonymity for the vast majority who requested it. But two doctors did not, Kelly Griffin and Lindsay Lief, both doctors at NY Presbyterian.

Their video is interactive, embedded in Suskind’s article and autoplays when you scroll down to it. I cannot embed it, but I can post some of the quotes. The video is harrowing as these two doctors commiserate about what they have had to deal with.  To access their conversation, go the link here and scroll down.

Some of the quotes from the video are included in Suskind’s article.

Dr. Lief says people — really smart people — ask her: “It’s like the flu, right?”

This is not the flu [:]                Dr. Lief

This is not the flu [:]                Dr. Griffin

“This is not the flu” is a mantra heard throughout the tapes, which rarely get political, but often carry base notes of incredulity and resentment about denial and misinformation coming from many directions — and the well-known failures of America’s government, economy and health care system. All of that is putting this small class of workers, upon whom so many lives depend, under untenable pressure.

Watching the doctors in that  the video, you’ll never mistake Covid-19 for the flu:

 My God, she was so young.  It’s hard to wrap your head around.

Many of the conversations of all these frontline medical treaters, Suskind notes, deal with the day-to-day reality of death these people have seen:

They veer into a matter-of-fact description of the horrors they’ve faced over the last few weeks. She talks about a man in his late 80s with a litany of preconditions that she encountered along with an I.C.U. fellow a few days before. The man’s condition was critical. There’s not much hope for him.

They wanted to get him to an I.C.U. bed, and the I.C.U. fellow was kind of hesitant, because everyone knows (he’s soon to die).   [Female resident]

 Just had to call it?   [Male resident]

 It’s such an uncomfortable decision to make, because we didn’t sign up to play God.               [Female resident]

      We had to call the morgue, and then clean up the bed, and the cleaning-up kind of held up a spot for someone else who’s been languishing in the E.D. (emergency department), waiting for an I.C.U.      

      …How do you make those decisions?