Back in March (was that 8 years ago?) I started tweeting about #Covid19. I was one of the first internal medicine residents at Bellevue Hospital in NYC to care for patients with covid, and I wanted to raise the alarm for the public of what was happening.

A thread 1/

Lately, I've been fairly quiet on Twitter about #covid19, and I've had to reflect on why that is. Do I not care anymore? I am not concerned? Do I have "covid fatigue"? I don't think it is any of that. 2/

We hoped that what we saw in NYC was the worst of this pandemic. We hoped the our fellow citizens and our government would learn from overwhelmed hospitals, the daily death tolls in the hundreds, the mobile morgues. 3/

I believed then that sharing that living nightmare from my vantage point on the frontlines might change hearts and minds. I think it did for some.

But now, so many months in, with an exponential third wave sweeping the country, I'm sad to say I don't believe that anymore. 4/

I am not a researcher or a public health official. I am a physician still in training who writes and speaks from her lived experience and emotional truth. It's never easy to tell difficult, traumatic stories. But sometimes it is worth it. Those stories can sometimes heal. 5/

It feels though, with #covid19, our healthcare worker stories just don't matter anymore. I am not going to relive and retweet my trauma to try convince people of what scientists have been saying for months: Covid is real. Masks and social distancing save lives. 6/

It also feels like in the beginning, my personal perspective was worth more. There was so much uncertainty. I had a frontline view. But now, the science is clear and what we have is not the failure of individuals but the failure of leadership. 7/

Tweeting about mask wearing feels like trying to reverse climate change by putting out recycling bins. of course, wear masks! recycle! However, these massive problems are the result of a deliberate effort by our government to ignore science for political and economic gain. 8/

For now, I've said what I've said about the trauma of the NYC spring covid surge. I wrote about it for @washingtonpost and @thenation
here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/covid-icu-hospital-outbreak/2020/04/02/d0895934-7525-11ea-85cb-8670579b863d_story.html
and here: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bellevue-mourning-inequality-coronavirus/ 9/

Why am I saying all of this? Because I've been feeling sort of guilty for not tweeting more about how awful covid is right now. Maybe because some 10k people started following me this spring during our covid surge. But I am giving myself permission to not rehash that trauma 10/

Healthcare workers across the country have said again and again, in a million different ways, how real and serious this pandemic is. We have forgone seeing our families, held iPads as loved ones said goodbye to our patients, developed pressure ulcers on our noses. 11/

Thank you to those who take this pandemic seriously. Thank you for electing a president who trusts scientists. I am still doing the hard work of caring for my patients and trying to keep my family and community safe, as are HCWs across the country. 12/12