I am really touched that my patients keep asking if I'm OK. I also have enough respect for them to say no. None of us are OK.

The anxiety that I feel all the time in the back of my mind about harming someone, missing something, is just amplified 100 x by the pandemic. A cough is not a simple thing anymore. Fatigue is more ominous.

And everything else has a new edge. Should I send my immune suppressed patient for an ultrasound, knowing that they'll likely be exposed to people who carry the virus?

All of this made worse because our institutions have not done half of what they could to protect us. All over the country, HCWs are asked to come to work when they could work from home. They're fired for wearing their own PPE. They're fired for critiquing inadequacy of response

The result is we are all necessarily AND unnecessarily exposed. Our clinics and hospitals were always going to be hotspots but the bureaucratic inertia here is maddening. It will kill many of us, my friends and patients included, and I will never stop being angry about that.

And stop calling us heroes. A hero runs into a burning building. Someone who is being exploited does it over and over without so much as a hose. We're not heroes: we are public servants. And our country has betrayed us.