I'll tell you right now: I'm listening to doctors, nurses, caregivers, epidemiologists and clinicians. My door is open to them, and it always will be.

They are mad as hell. They feel betrayed. We have dumped the weight of the world on their shoulders and called it a feather.

I want you put yourself in the shoes of a COVID worker. I spoke to a doctor yesterday who lives in hell right now. Every day he faces the realities of a virus-savaged hospital. He talks endlessly to families desperate for good news, and he almost never has good news to give.

Then after he's taken off the spacesuit he crams himself into to protect his own family, he steps out into a parallel universe, a twilight zone that would rather debate the facts of his day than heed his warnings. Sometimes he hears the denialism on the radio on his commute home.

I've talked to nurses who weep when they recall the details of their units. You think you're feeling lonely? Missing out on family get togethers? Their isolation is absolute. They don't get to pretend it's not real. The death and misery of this disease is flesh and blood to them.

But still, we equivocate, we dissemble, we play these tortured games with data to try and pretend what thousands of us see every day isn't real. We pretend they're fattening their wallets. Most of us couldn't last a day in their units if we could name our own wage.

Do NOT tell me this is the best we're capable of as a state, a country, or a people. The hospital workers will be doing everything in their power. Retired doctors will come back to work. Nursing students will take on full duties. Patient load will expand like a balloon.

Every single one of us- ESPECIALLY those with power- should prepare to display more dedication, flexibility, ingenuity, and willpower than ever before. Some people don't have the option to phone it in. This is it: there is a finish line ahead. Who will we leave alive to cross it?