Fear, Grief, and Anger
The hauling of Dr. Fauci before a congressional committee AGAIN gave me a flood of feelings about the pandemic response as a public health professional. And reminded me how those feelings are entwined with Zac’s death. Zac died May 21, 2020, almost two months or so into lock down. We flew out that weekend to deal with the aftermath. It was terrifying. The airports were empty. The hotel warned us that they were on a skeleton crew and all services were reduced. We masked up and stood outside Target for a long time waiting our turn to go in and buy supplies to clean and pack up Zac’s apartment. Every interaction with people felt dangerous. We held each other in Zac’s apartment, sobbing through our masks. Terrified to face the reality he was gone and terrified we would get each other sick.
The coroner’s office and the mortuary were completely overwhelmed with the death toll. We were told we could view Zac but it would be very carefully scheduled and viewing would be limited. We were warned the autopsy and toxicology report would take a while. I decided I did not want to see Zac’s body. I didn’t want to remember him that way and I didn’t want to take another risk of being in a public place. I wanted to remember him in the line for the Haunted Mansion, eating popcorn and laughing about how bad some lady’s t-shirt was.
At the same time, I was a public health professional trying to respond to the pandemic in real time with rapidly evolving information. We made the best decisions we could to save as many lives as possible with the information we had. Mistakes were made. We should’ve been better communicators about the uncertainty of dealing with a novel virus. We should’ve been clearer about how we were making decisions based on rapidly evolving information. Would it have helped? I think so. But I also think that as humans, we are terrified of uncertainty and death. That makes it challenging to say that “saying it better” would’ve vastly improved the public’s understanding and opinions. People distrust public health, science and vaccines for many reasons. We still have so much we could learn from the pandemic but we’re not asking the right questions or preparing the way we should for the next pandemic. Instead, they are pointing the finger at one doctor. A very influential doctor, of course. But Dr. Fauci is one doctor. There are hundreds of public health professionals, infectious disease doctors, nurses, epidemiologists, researchers, etc. globally who all worked tirelessly to save lives and made extremely difficult decisions with limited information.
I carry a lot of grief from the pandemic. I have a lot of anger about how doctors like Fauci and nurses and my fellow public health professionals have been threatened by some who want a villain to take the blame for the global experience of living through a pandemic. They are full of fear and grief and anger just like me and want to blame someone. What we need to do now is stop blaming each other and start planning for the next one. Because there will be a next one.
