This week marks two particularly devastating milestones, one local and one national, in the COVID-19 pandemic. Santa Barbara county recorded its first death from COVID-19, a man in his sixties at Marian Medical Center. In addition, our national physician community mourns the loss of the first emergency physician to die from COVID-19, Dr. Frank Gabrin, two-time cancer survivor and emergency-room physician in New Jersey, who died in his husband’s arms on Tuesday. I invite you to pause and consider the use of the descriptor “first” being utilized in all media releases about these men. This indicates the obvious, horrible truth, which is that there will be more deaths. Many more.
I believe it is safe to say that the events of the last few weeks have felt surreal for all of us. Even as a physician who foresaw the need for shelter-in-place orders and predicted the extent of the of the turmoil this disease would cause long before the general public came to accept this, the reality is still stranger and scarier than I could have predicted.
Perhaps the most strange, scary, and surreal moments I’ve had in the past few weeks are the extensive and ongoing conversations with my fellow physicians about how to quickly increase our life insurance benefits and add that youngest child to our wills, as we’ve been meaning to do for a few years.