As COVID spread across the country, many experts from different fields began weighing in with ideas for battling the pandemic. They had conversations by phone and online. Now, they’ve connected again – led by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
He worries the country will abandon caution when it comes to COVID – a view shared by Professor Vivian Riefberg at UVA’s graduate school of business.
“We’re going to be living with it for a very long time, just as we live with the flu,” she says.
And the flu is not to be taken lightly.
“Bad flu seasons can fill hospitals, can cause temporary worker shortage and kill more than 50,000 Americans a year.”
Riefberg hopes we have learned from the last two years and will make changes to ensure better care in the years to come.
“Many of the existing challenges facing health care workforce were laid bare by COVID," she recalls, "so one of the things I’ve been most interested in making sure we address is ensuring we have a fully functional healthcare system and a workforce that can fully deliver on that.”
We need, for example, to make sure health care professionals have what they need – protective equipment, good air circulation in the workplace, enough down time to prevent burnout and paid sick leave. Riefberg also calls for more research on Long COVID.
“It’s a serious and sometimes debilitating condition, and although there have been some allocation of money for this, research into its incidence, causes and treatments have been slower than most of us would like to see.Too much of this is still a mystery.”
She urges the state and the nation to be better prepared for future outbreaks of COVID:
“It’s extremely important that despite our fatigue that we don’t stop learning the lessons and apply them for the future and fund what is needed to protect us for the future. I think sometimes in our desire to move on from COVID we may not capture those lessons.”
And she hopes positive changes – like the widespread adoption of tele-medicine during the pandemic – will remain a part of our everyday system of healthcare.
