[ad_1]
Robert Neubecker
By Meredith Wadman
When not caring for COVID-19 patients – her latest was a man with bacterial lung and blood infections superimposed on SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia – Krutika Kuppalli has helped oversee the rollout of vaccines against pandemic at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), where she is an infectious disease physician. She also met with hospital staff hesitant about vaccination, sitting on a committee reviewing all planned COVID-19 clinical trials at MUSC, seeking funding to study patients with long-term COVID, and dealing with online harassment that has taken place. followed his numerous media appearances and two rounds of testimony to Congress last summer.
When asked recently in an interview with Zoom how she was doing, she paused for almost 20 seconds, struggling to regain her composure. “We’ve been breaking our butt for 12, 14 months,” she says. “I just feel like I’m empty.”
From university research centers and intensive care units (ICUs) to scientific journals and government agencies, scientists battling the pandemic say they are hitting a wall, 16 months after a group of case of pneumonia in Wuhan, China, introduced the virus. it would turn their lives upside down. “The pace that has led to the incredible generation of knowledge about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 has placed enormous demands on the people who are supposed to generate this knowledge,” says David O’Connor, viral sequencing expert at the university. from Wisconsin, Madison, which has tracked the spread of the virus, hosted Zoom Q&A sessions with hesitant vaccines and helped neighborhood schools set up diagnostic tests. “It is a terrible time and we should all do what we can to help. But is it going to be sustainable? “
Throughout higher education, many feel strained by campus closures, distance education, research disruptions, the challenges of working from home, and more. For example, a survey of more than 1,100 faculty members in the United States found that 55% had seriously considered changing careers or retiring prematurely due to the pandemic. The survey, conducted in October 2020 by The Chronicle of Higher Education and Fidelity Investments, also found that 69% of respondents felt stressed, 68% felt tired and 35% angry, more than double the figures for 2019. An international survey by the De Gruyter publishing house found an equally grim picture among medical and life scientists in particular, although the numbers are low: out of 116 respondents, 76% said the pandemic had had an impact on their well-being; 30% said the impact was “serious”.
Doctors have borne much of the burden, says Mona Masood, a Philadelphia-area psychiatrist and founder of the Physician Support Line, a toll-free service of volunteer psychiatrists. The helpline has answered calls from over 2,000 people since its launch 1 year ago; calls peaked during pandemic outbreaks, Masood says. Some are from primary care physicians – for example, an ICU doctor who had just lost his 20th patient and broke down on the phone after a 48-hour shift. Others come from doctor-scientists who, despite their work on vaccines or variants, feel guilty for not treating COVID-19 patients alongside their colleagues.
For young scientists, the crisis has amplified the tensions already present in the academic system. “Everyone works nights, weekends, every minute of their life. There is no additional salary. There is no guarantee of further recognition, ”says Emma Hodcroft, computational biologist and post-doctoral fellow at the University of Bern who has followed the development of SARS-CoV-2 for the Nextstrain project. “I have a precarious job; I don’t have a long term job. I feel a lot of pressure for this to be my chance and I can’t waste it, ”says Hodcroft, author of 18 SARS-CoV-2 articles and pre-impressions since February 2020.
Some university scientists, especially those with young children, say their institutions haven’t done much to alleviate their stress. “A few” attack boys “are being pushed by the Provost to thank the faculty for their flexibility in the face of difficult times, but no real difference has been made,” wrote a senior lecturer in a recent report from the Academies national science, engineering and medicine. discovered a disproportionate and deleterious impact of COVID-19 on the careers of women in the academic fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine.
Requests for revision or editing of a relentless glut of articles on coronaviruses have also been backbreaking for some. “They replaced me with two people. That tells you what my workload was, ”says a biology manuscript editor who recently left a leading journal and asked not to be identified for fear of career repercussions.
Scientific societies have, in some cases, tried to enter the breach. The American Association for Anatomy (AAA) in October 2020 launched a self-care resource website called THRIVE in response to “pleas for help” from members, largely doctoral students. anatomists who teach and conduct research in medical schools, says Shawn Boynes, executive director of AAA and the driving force behind THRIVE. The website, which is open to everyone, has had around 3,000 visitors per month, but Boynes says it’s a bandaid at best. “Why are there not more topics discussed at the institutional level on a regular basis? The pandemic has pulled the curtain back and you can see how incredibly difficult it is for people who choose academia as a career.
The challenges go beyond academia. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for example, the burden of being the frontline agency to respond to the pandemic has taken its toll. “This issue of burnout, personal and professional, is the # 1 thing I talk about with friends,” says senior CDC epidemiologist who has worked at a high level in pandemic response . Some mid-career CDC scientists are talking about early retirement – a choice that was almost unheard of before COVID-19, they add.
Yet other scientists struggling with the pandemic say despite the pressure, they have never felt so satisfied. The past 16 months have been “the hardest months of my life,” says Sarah Schmedes, chief bioinformatist at the Florida Bureau of Public Health Laboratories. Schmedes is adjusting to being a single mother of a one-year-old son after her husband died of a heart attack in December 2019. “It really helps that I love my job. To be in this field right now is incredibly rewarding. I am very honored.
Marion Koopmans, head of the viroscience department at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, says she has been working at least 8 a.m. to 11 p.m., 6 or 7 days a week since the start of the pandemic. Recently, she traveled to Wuhan as part of a World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the pandemic, while managing a 150-person laboratory in Rotterdam. “I don’t feel like I’m exhausting,” she said. “I can actually do things that help overcome the pandemic. At least that’s what it feels like. And that helps. Yet, she says, she takes steps to protect a minimum of personal time so that she can watch. Anne with an E on Netflix or share a nightcap with her husband. “I ask the strictest secretary to block my calendar and pass my emails to her.”
But O’Connor insists on the need for the community to take broader action. “A year later, we have to assess: what does the future look like? Does this sound like asking the same workforce to do twice as much as before? I don’t know what the correct answer is, but the number of times [recently] I have heard that “I’m just done with this” expressed in frustration from friends and colleagues is truly disturbing. “
Kuppalli for his part doesn’t see the end of his own exhaustion in sight, in part because every time he’s asked to do one more thing to fight the pandemic, “I don’t feel like I can. say no. Because he is taller than me and I feel lucky to be able to contribute. “
With a report by Charles Piller.
[ad_2]
Source link