A physician’s plea: Take COVID-19 seriously, wear a mask, don’t let it be political
On the day of our medical school graduation, I stood in a low-lit room, side-by-side with my fellow colleagues in fear and wonderment of what the future would bring. I didn’t know then that the people surrounding me would become my brothers and sisters in this unabashed epidemiologic war on COVID-19 and science.
Everything seemed simple, and the future overwhelmingly optimistic as we stood together and took the Physician’s Oath into our hearts and minds. We pledged to dedicate our lives to serve humanity and the health and well-being of our future patients, to maintain the utmost respect for human life and to not use our medical knowledge to violate human rights or civil liberties.
It is from this sacred place that I write with the utmost urgency and sincerity. From this perspective that I plead with the American people to open themselves, to identify whatever hesitancy they are harboring and to put it aside and read these words with openness and their guard down. As a people, we need to come together, we need to see the public health efforts regarding this pandemic just as that, public health efforts, and not as dividing lines in politics.
The COVID-19 public health initiatives have been transformed and leveraged into political platforms, and during the election, each representative played to their constituency for votes. I urge you to consider this: You and your life are worth more than a vote. I urge you to realize that medicine is the only entity that has the power to transcend social and political barriers; medicine is not a business because human lives are not a commodity. Yet, lives are being reduced to red and blue lines and a black bubble on a ballot.
A virus does not care which party you vote for, its only imperative is to latch onto a host to survive. Wearing a mask is not a Democratic or Republican ideology; wearing a mask is a public health policy and medical recommendation.
As a doctor, it is important that I try and get you to hear this, hear it down into your core, until you see the act of wearing a mask during this pandemic as an act for the betterment of health and humanity. The cloth mask that you wear does not protect you from getting the virus as much as it prevents you from unknowingly giving the virus to those around you if you are infected or an asymptomatic carrier.
America, this is our defining moment, a rallying cry to come together as one, in order to keep each other alive. For our cure will not be the resounding voice of one person’s reiteration of what it means to be human, rather a collective expression of humanism and demonstration that people are most powerful when they are standing together.
Our cure will come only once the human lives around us become at least as important as us.
As we venture into unprecedented incidence rates for COVID-19 since the pandemic began in March, I ask you to please wear a mask, to please be safe and to listen to the medical experts in your community and not to politicians at large.
COVID-19 is not a political movement, and this is not a political statement.
We are in the midst of a ruthless pandemic and this letter is a physician’s plea, one that is written from a place of respect and service to the human spirit.