CLEVELAND, Ohio — It’s too soon to declare final victory over COVID-19, but it’s the perfect time to honor the caregivers who got us through the pandemic.
We want to do that in a big way. And, whether you were a patient or a health care worker, we need your help.
If you are a nurse or a doctor who’d like to share your experiences or honor a colleague, please share what you can on the form at: https://tinyurl.com/healthcaregivers2021.
If you want to honor heroic doctors, nurses, technicians and aides, perhaps because they helped you or perhaps because you know and love them, we want to hear your story. Please fill out the form at: https://tinyurl.com/healthcareheroism2021.
Please share your remembrances soon. We’ll be publishing the most powerful stories in a special section, Healthcare Heroes, around National Nurses Week, May 6-12. But first, we’ll edit submissions for length and for clarity. We may get in touch to ask a few extra questions. We’ll certainly give you a chance to approve your story before we publish it. Doing all those things properly will take us a few weeks.
Why the urgency? Partly because our caregivers deserve recognition.
Last spring, medical workers around the country could see a wall of death headed their way. They knew COVID-19 had killed colleagues in Asia and Europe. They knew it put them and their families at risk. They went to work anyway. They saved countless lives, at the cost of more than 3,500 of their own.
In fact, they worked miracles. The United States had one of the world’s worst COVID-19 caseloads. But thanks to our caregivers we had one of the world’s best case-fatality rates. When we couldn’t protect ourselves, they saved us.
Another reason for urgency is that memories fade quickly.
With luck, vaccines will make COVID-19 just another nuisance and then a distant memory, like the Spanish Flu.
But we can’t afford to forget it. So let’s honor the heroes who got us through it.
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