Category: Infectious disease

Ensuring equity of a COVID-19 vaccine

Recently, the White House unveiled its ambitious plan to develop a coronavirus vaccine before year’s end. While many immediately questioned the feasibility of this timeline, we worry that not enough attention has gone to a different but equally importa…

Reflecting on Elmhurst Hospital: past, present, and future

Elmhurst 2014 I first arrived at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, NY, in the summer of 2014 as a medical student on my surgery rotation. We would take occasional night shifts as part of the trauma team. It was the first time I held a pager. Code yellow mea…

COVID-19 is not a Chinese virus, nor an Asian virus. It is a human virus.

“Chinese virus.” The term shocked me the first time I heard it, and since then, racial slurs and hate crimes against Asian Americans have broken out across the country. Dr. Clara Lee, a pediatrician in New Jersey, recalls, “At the grocery store, I got …

A pediatric hematologist explains multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children

The recent pandemic has confined people all over the world to the indoors to try to keep the virus from spreading. Older adults have been the most commonly affected age group with the virus, but more recently, a strange presentation of COVID-19 has bee…

I’m ready for the change COVID-19 will bring

I am a graduating fourth-year medical student and new internal medicine resident — one of many newly minted physicians that will be thrown into the frontline to take care of COVID-19 patients in a little over a month. It’s a strange time to be gr…

COVID exposed this state’s mangled health care system

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it revealed a troubling paradox in Vermont’s healthscape. Monopoly-creating laws and regulations (like the Affordable Care Act and the Certificate of Need program) have artificially reduced the state’s health facil…

Are there reasons to doubt remdesivir?

On April 29th Anthony Fauci announced the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an institute he runs, had completed a study of the antiviral remdesivir for COVID-19. The drug reduced time to recovery from 15 to 11 days, he said, a brea…

Vulnerability gives us strength in a time when so much seems beyond our control

I pull my car into the garage and exhale wearily.  I’ve just finished rounds at the hospital, including PUIs for COVID-19.  I’m lucky.  I get a new N95 every day, but still, I’ve seen the steady reports of diligent physicians getting infected, so I kno…

A physician wedding in the age of COVID

April 2020 was to be a month of personal milestones. I would be traveling to Mexico with sixty closest friends and family to marry the woman of my dreams. Twelve days later, I would celebrate my thirtieth birthday. Suffice it to say, I was looking forw…

I have discovered the immense strength it takes to be vulnerable

As I sit through another meeting discussing our facility’s preparedness for COVID-19, my mind circles back to my infant at home. Husband and I are both frontline physicians, fully aware we may need to take on more shifts and responsibilities. Do I have…