A Critical COVID Metric: Your ED Staff Infection Rate

If you are like me, in recent days you have experienced moments of fear. Feelings like when you woke up in bed at night as a kid, and saw a dark shadow in the corner, and wondered if it was going to get you. If you are like me, in recent days you have also experienced awe at so many triumphs over such fear, individual, and collective – our 65-year-old ED clerk showing up to their shift, through great anxiety, or healthcare providers boarding buses heading into the teeth of the Wuhan epidemic. The pages of AEM this month provide further examples of such triumphs, of individuals in a time and place of great stress overcoming the impulse to curl up and focus on themselves, and instead expanding beyond themselves to help others. This is the finest tradition of humanity and medicine, and all of these efforts at service through science inspire and give heart.