Beginning of a crisis
On March 11, 2020, the WHO put words to the fear that was already brewing in many health care workers minds: COVID-19 was a pandemic. Many of us who had begun to pay attention to the news of a mysterious new respiratory illness were already alarmed in late January when the WHO acknowledged there was a global health crisis. Our county already had it’s first COVID-19 case declared just a few days prior, but it could be traced to positive travel contacts at that point.
Late March I was asked to be a part of a small core group of hospitalists who would be dedicated to taking care of COVID-19 patients at our hospital. A task force was established and rapidly worked through testing, PPE supplies, and isolation of patients. There was a lot to figure out on the fly, a lot of fear, and a lot of unknowns. Over the course of the year however, we adapted to changes in science, we encouraged each other, and we shared frustrations and anger. We celebrated those who survived and wept for many who died. That crucible experience of watching death and suffering inside my hospital was counterbalanced by watching the world outside respond and transform. March marked the point at which the whole country shut down, watched and waited.
As the year went on, society showed several different faces. What would have been an opportunity to unite our country, to come together as one people, turned instead into an opportunity to more vividly illustrate our differences. And those differences weren’t pretty.
So, what have we learned about our country one year later?
Politics are more polarized than ever
Data from a Pew Research Study demonstrates that the political divides we face seem more crystalized than ever. Our two-party political system has split us based upon concrete divisions of race, religion, and ideology. And the unfortunate consequence of our entrenched political divisions is that we faced a (hopefully) once in a lifetime event with disorder and hostility, instead of science and community.
From personal experience, what should be discussion and debate about differences of opinion seem to devolve into a difference of fundamental morality. Moral issues tend to be complex, but our “hot take culture” – from news sound bites, to memes, to “2 minute read” blog posts – tends to distill the issues into a quick emotional take. It makes for good consumer engagement, but it’s bad for bringing people together and terrible for getting to a depth of understanding. Yet too often we take this consumer-driven media as a substitute for true objective education on a topic, and find ourselves in tribal camps with more and more extreme competing creeds.
We have not made peace with our past
America has a history of racism and oppression. It has great accomplishments, and has contributed to the growth and betterment of society, but we would be foolish to believe that it is a perfect moral compass for the world.
Systemic racism is an often misunderstood phrase, and even I didn’t fully understand it for a while. A look at the data, however, shows that Black Americans face numerous statistical disadvantages compared to other racial groups. Much of this comes from centuries of slavery impact and decades of oppressive policies, many of which still have not been fully erased from from the books.
We can still accomplish amazing things together
The vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 are the fastest developed in history. An article in Nature does a fantastic job detailing this historic scientific achievement. They did not however come out of nowhere, but rather used existing science developed over decades. What was different with these vaccines is that there was a dedicated effort to working together and prioritizing development of a vaccine to save lives. It is clear evidence that even in spite of our differences and societal problems, we have the ability to solve seemingly impossible problems in short order when we work together.
Americans love the stories of great achievement, of the ordinary person rising above all odds to overcome oppression. The pandemic exposed a lot of areas of weakness, but we also have evidence that we can easily and rapidly address those weaknesses and improve life for everyone in our nation. The biggest barrier to achieving a societal revolution is ourselves. It will take effort from everyone, effort to see our similarities rather than our differences, to make this our best decade yet.