As COVID-19 spreads across the country, those on the front lines are the nurses and doctors who take care of patients.
Statistically, those who are falling ill to this new virus are a small portion of the population, except in some of the hardest hit areas. There, people who are sick or think they might be sick are filling hospital emergency rooms and doctors’ offices waiting for testing, waiting for hospital beds or waiting to undergo treatment.
While these doctors and nurses are dealing with patients who are sick or showing probable symptoms, they are also treating patients suffering from cancer, broken bones, influenza, heart disease, asthma and pulmonary conditions, dog bites, gunshots, head trauma, colds, infectious diseases, bodily trauma from car accidents as well as women going into labor with their babies and terminal patients dying from a whole host of diseases that take our lives daily.
We commend these doctors and nurses for serving on the front lines to keep our communities safe and healthy.
As the son of a nurse who worked in emergency rooms and operating rooms, and who now works in the administration of a hospital, I know that these jobs are not easy. While doctors operate on patients, healing their internal injuries, prescribing medicine for treatment, diagnosing diseases and attempting to cure and heal, nurses are the professionals in the trenches. They meet patients to treat and triage their needs long before they see a doctor.
Nurses also deal with patients insisting on care they have not been diagnosed for and might not or do not need, as well as hypochondriacs, patients who are drunk, on drugs or in such pain that they are no longer thinking or acting rationally.
The front-line doctors and nurses not only deal with sick patients, but put themselves at risk for disease, and not just COVID-19, but every other infectious disease — such as flu — which has infected 54 million Americans and killed an estimated 59,000 this season.
Aside from the medical professionals at hospitals, there are also scores of doctors and nurses at general practice and family offices who are treating their regular patients who might have COVID-19.
These professionals are not working in the full Trauma Level I facilities fully equipped to deal with mass casualties and disease outbreaks, but in local offices around the corner treating their regular loyal patients and recommending treatment for their patients who think they have contracted this novel coronavirus.
Their jobs are even harder considering they are not treating people off the street but rather their loyal repeat customers whom they have treated for months, years or perhaps their entire lives.
The testing, both in Arizona and nationwide, shows that the vast majority of people who think they have COVID-19 don’t — roughly 84% by some estimates of those tested come back negative for this strain of coronavirus. Instead, these patients have one of the many strains of influenza or a host of upper respiratory problems caused by other infectious diseases that have circulated in our populations for millennia, centuries or mere decades.
Doctors and nurses have to make the triage choices to test or not test certain patients based on their symptoms and then the far more difficult decision to tell those patients that despite all their insistence, they likely don’t have the disease that the television or Facebook tells them they must have.
Stress among patients is compounded by the fact that with the current fervor on social media and cable news, not every cough, runny nose or high temperature is from this virus and cannot possibly be anything else, which we rationally know even if it’s hard to believe sometimes. There are dozens if not hundreds of new viruses that emerge every year from new sources or as previous bacterial infections mutate or viruses change in response to their environments or our attempts to kill them.
Biologically, we are always running to stand still.
The battle against disease is an arms race we fight on the micro and macro levels. We thank all our nurses, doctors, office staff, orderlies, health care workers and medical staff for all their efforts in this forever war.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
