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…
Category: Public Health & Policy
COVID is not a great equalizer
Some media outlets and public figures have heralded the ongoing pandemic as a great equalizer, referencing the pathogen’s indiscriminate spread and disregard for national borders and tax brackets. The sobering mortality statistics, however, dispe…
The impact of COVID on the Hispanic community
There are so many. As health care providers and as a nation, we have been acutely aware of the impact of COVID-19 on communities of color and, more specifically, on the African American community. In April, nearly three-fourths of patients who died fro…
A proposed public health response to facilitate continued adherence to COVID-19 restrictions
At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, 46 million people were placed under a 76-day lockdown in Wuhan, China. The conversation around this initial story centered on the resilience of that population, isolating in the face of an unknown and deadly t…
A response to unemployment during the COVID pandemic: Medicare for all
One afternoon in clinic, I opened a patient’s chart for a telehealth visit. Within days of the COVID pandemic, all clinic visits had transitioned to telehealth. The young woman had sent a picture through the electronic medical record of a rash on her l…
How the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the need for class consciousness among physicians
What labor struggles do a grocery worker, custodian, and doctor in the United States have in common? A few months ago, many people’s answers may have been – not much. But ever since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, our shared challenges are becoming ever mor…
Stop calling health care workers heroes and do something to help them
The narrative that paints health care workers as “heroes” makes me uncomfortable. I may not have a right to an opinion as I am third-string back up not currently working in an overwhelmed ER or ICU. I also feel uneasy about the sea of grati…
The social determinants of health during the COVID-19 pandemic
As an academic internist, over the past five years, I’ve been hearing more and more about social determinants of health. I have read countless journal articles comparing health outcomes; I’ve attended grand rounds on the subject; recently, our electro…
Who should we really be testing for COVID-19?
The Canadian federal government recently announced it would fund at least one million blood tests to track the novel coronavirus over the next two years. This is a step in the right direction. But is it enough? How do we know if we are testing the ri…
What makes people defy precautions during a pandemic?
We are in the midst of an unequaled juncture in history, one in which we find ourselves primarily armed with the ability to distance ourselves physically from one another. In the United States, we have observed on multiple occasions over the past sever…
