Remembering Physicians Lost to COVID-19

The coronavirus pandemic has been an ongoing crisis in the United States for nearly eight months. As of this writing, we are grappling with the collective grief we feel as the death toll in the United States approaches 230,000. The hundreds of thousands of lives lost are difficult to comprehend. Faces of COVID, a Twitter account, tells the individual stories of people lost to COVID-19 through obituaries, family submissions, and news reports.

Among the many lost to the coronavirus are thousands of healthcare workers. Globally, at least 7,000 healthcare workers have died of COVID-19. A report released by National Nurses United (NNU) at the end of September estimated the number of healthcare workers that have died of Covid-19 to be more than 1,700. The authors write,

“Comprehensive disclosure and transparency with respect to COVID-related health care worker deaths have been all too rare. These deaths frequently have been met with silence or outright denials. If hospitals are not widely required to publicly disclose their deaths and infection rates, they lack important incentives not to become zones of infection. We cannot allow the more than 1,700 deaths, many of them avoidable, to be swept under the rug, and vanished from our collective memory by the health care industry.”

The COVID-19 Physicians Memorial is a public Facebook group that shares the stories of some of our lost colleagues. These stories are painful reminders of what is at stake. The U.S. recently hit the highest number of new cases in a single day since the pandemic began. How can we honor the colleagues we’ve lost?

We can remember them. And we can work to save as many lives as we can. A new study suggests that if 95% of Americans commit to wearing masks, more than 100,000 lives could be saved between now and February. Encourage others to honor lost healthcare workers by wearing masks and saving lives.