Rogan Magee
Sidney Kimmel Medical College
Last week, my aunt texted me a link to a YouTube video. In it, a citizen journalist compiled footage of several hospitals, emphasizing the lack of queues to their front doors and how empty their waiting rooms appeared to be from outside. The other half of the thirteen-minute montage highlighted contradictory footage from news outlets that instead showed long lines outside those same NYC and California hospitals. One particularly embarrassing segment caught a channel red handed in redubbing footage of an Italian ICU as scenes from the front lines in NYC. With the video came my aunt’s difficult question to field, “How are things at your hospital?”
I haven’t stopped thinking about that conversation since it ended. My aunt isn’t one for sharing opinions – political or otherwise – and much less one for trying to discuss video evidence. In fact, until this month, her time spent on YouTube had been limited to forced viewings of makeup tutorials at the hands of my ten-year-old cousin. She is, however, like the rest of my family, quite good at converting fear and anxiety into analytical investigation, and I could see the hallmarks of that process in full swing in the texts we exchanged.
My fiancée and I represent our extended family’s only personal connections to a hospital, so the question was well intentioned, but I felt poorly positioned to answer. Unfortunately for both my aunt and me, I am a newly minted fourth year medical student. In effect, I am almost as close to insider information on the pandemic as my aunt. All I could share were the number of ICU and non-ICU cases as reported in a schoolwide email the previous Friday. I couldn’t comment on the state of affairs and definitely didn’t want to comment on the validity of the contents of the video. Understandably, my information did little to assuage my aunt’s fear and one of her last comments has stuck with me, “I just don’t know what to believe right now.”
These words played on my own fear as both a medical student and a quarantine participant. Lack of belief in the threat carries with it the potential to undermine the steps we need to take toward neutralization. If we believe in the capacity for ICU beds to run out and for hospitals to become overwhelmed, we stay home and do our best to never see that potential future. But if we underestimate our vulnerability, we instead take one step toward that future. Belief, for better or for worse, is the single most important tool in our fight against COVID-19.
If you are one of thousands of students who studied biology on your way to medical school, you won’t blink at the fact that there lives a semiaquatic mammal in Australia that lays eggs to reproduce. For those not familiar with the duck-billed platypus, that information sounds closer to fiction than fact as it bends rules about how mammals should pass their time. It might be easier instead to believe it as something from Dr. Seuss. Fortunately, there are plenty of videos of the platypus, pictures of it in its habitat, and field reports that teachers draw on to share the news about this one-of-a-kind creature. Moreover, skeptics may have the privilege to visit a platypus in a zoo or to meet someone who has come face-to-face with one and can vouch for its existence.
Because of medical school, I’m primed to interpret the news on SARS-CoV-2 and process the discussion that is dominating the media. I can dip into preprint archives and try to form a rough opinion on potential treatments, what a vaccine timeline might look like, or where we stand with regard to testing capacity. For those like my aunt, who spend less time thinking about medicine and more time on taxes, law, or other fields, the information is less interpretable. And so the latest pronouncements on distancing guidelines or potential treatments are clouded in mystery, and the dissenting opinions seem less like productive forces in the scientific discourse and more like reasons to panic.
The major reason I find myself unable to leave our conversation in last week centers on good luck. When my aunt texted me, no one connected to our extended family had tested positive. She and I together have zero personal connections from whom to understand the experience. And so the threat of the pandemic might feel more abstract to my aunt. I think I can understand how and why she might be less inclined to believe that hospitals might become overrun and more inclined to believe that ED waiting rooms around the country are empty. Without personal evidence to draw on or trusted data to process, the threat appears ambiguous.
My family is tremendously lucky to not yet have joined millions of Americans who have been personally touched by the virus, something that I remain thankful for with each new day. So I will try to honor that luck by doing my best to keep up discussions on the pandemic, sharing my disposition to believe in expert advice, and drawing on my own training to share with those who are more distant from these ideas. As we adapt to online curricula and virtual encounters, I think taking intentional steps toward engaging in open communication with each other, our friends and families, and anyone who has questions on how to proceed is one of the most accessible ways medical students can fight COVID-19 in our new roles at home. Spreading and encouraging belief in expert recommendations -- to stay at home, to trust the process -- will be our most valuable contribution to resolving the pandemic.