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Today we are just beginning to grasp the dislocations COVID-19 will wreak upon the nation. If a single untimely death like my grandfather’s can derail a family for decades, it’s stunning to think how painfully tens of thousands of COVID-19 fatalities will ripple through society. The anguish of lost jobs, the corrosive worry about falling ill or paying the rent, the deferred medical appointments, the disrupted educations, the social dislocation, the psychological toll of isolation and despair — these echoes of the coronavirus will be with us long after a vaccine is found. (Renée Loth, 4/24)

“How can he be so stupid?” a dad asked me in a telehealth visit. His voice shook with fear and rage as he described his adolescent son sneaking out to meet friends against legal and family orders to stay at home. As a child psychiatrist, I’ve been fielding many such calls. (Lisa Jacobs, 4/27)

Fears about the novel coronavirus, the economic meltdown, and prolonged self-isolation are taking an emotional toll on Americans. Calls to the federal mental health crisis hotline are 900 percent greater than this time last year. In normal times, one in five American adults deals with mental health issues. (Arielle Kane, 4/26)

Susan Morley runs the behavioral health clinic at the South Middlesex Opportunity Council, a nonprofit agency that serves poor people in Framingham. When the COVID-19 stay-at-home advisory began last month, preventing people from coming into the clinic for their therapy sessions, Morley and her staff struggled to keep tabs on their clients. Many of the clients can’t check in over video chat, because they don’t have broadband Internet at home and can’t go to the libraries where they sometimes get online. (4/26)

Three times as many people have died in the United States from COVID19 than died on September 11, 2001, and we are not yet to the peak in most states. According to recent estimates, more Americans are likely to die in the coming weeks than in World War I, the Korean War or the Vietnam War — a scale of death many of us have never seen, and certainly not on American shores. (Wendy Cadge, 4/26)                                        

Telehealth has stolen the spotlight as the new way to deliver patient care following the overnight disruption of COVID-19. While the CMS and providers have encouraged broader use of telehealth tools to maintain regular visits and contain spread of the virus, many beneficiaries use another favorite handoff in the continuum of care—home health. (Aurora Aguilar, 4/25)

I’ve been working at Dollar General here for more than two years. My manager is wonderful, and I have a great relationship with my customers. But when I took this job I never planned to become a worker on the front line of a pandemic. I close the register many nights, so I know my store’s revenue has practically doubled since the coronavirus hit. But we workers haven’t gotten any extra money, even though we’re risking our health, and our families’ health, to keep the stores running. Louisiana’s governor is expected to lift parts of the stay-at-home order soon. I don’t think our state is ready for that and I know my co-workers aren’t. (Kenya Slaughter, 4/26)

Pandemics, even as they cause untold suffering, do more than create new problems. They reveal long-held cultural attitudes, approaches to faith in governance and differing beliefs about individual rights and trust in science. Historically speaking, these myriad responses reemerge from pandemic to pandemic in recycling patterns of seemingly historical truisms. We ignore, we deny, we blame. (Jennifer Le Zotte and Jacob Steere-Williams, 4/26)

Ask any doctor, nurse, or other clinician about UpToDate and you’ll get some version of this answer: I use it all the time to stay current, and often pull it up when I’m talking with patients. For clinicians around the world, UpToDate is essentially Google for medicine, but smarter and based on evidence. The creator of this invaluable and now-omnipresent resource, Dr. Burton “Bud” Rose, a brilliant kidney specialist, entrepreneur, and our friend and colleague, died on Friday from complications of Covid-19 at age 77. (Martin Pollak, Mark Zeidel and Theodore Steinman, 4/25)

These figures will continue to rise, because although the virus can affect anyone, the residents of long-term care facilities are particularly susceptible to COVID-19, given dynamics such as age, underlying illnesses, and their proximity to one another (including shared rooms and bathrooms) and to their caregivers. But these commonly accepted factors are not the only reason COVID-19 is proliferating in our nursing homes: The poverty wages paid to caregivers and the understaffing of our long-term care facilities are also to blame. (Chas Walker, 4/25)