Supporting the World Community

Dr. Candice North ’04 on the front lines of COVID-19

The Sacramento, California community where Candice

North MD ’04 serves as a hospitalist was one of the first in the United States to be impacted by COVID-19. The nearby Travis Air Force Base was being used to provide care to passengers exposed to COVID-19 on a trip with Princess Cruises.

At that time, there were no clear guidelines on what people should be doing and what was safe, North says, and quarantine measures failed. Therefore, communities from the Bay Area to Sacramento were on high alert right from the beginning of the pandemic even before most people in the country were worried about it.

North’s community also was the first in the United States to socially distance, so residents there have been socially isolated longer than anyone else. “When you add that to the unique experience of being a frontline worker from the start, it has been quite a mentally confining time,” she says.

North is a hospitalist at Sutter Sacramento Medical Center. A hospitalist is an internal medicine or family medicine physician and performs rounds on patients and coordinates inpatient care. During the pandemic, hospitalists have treated COVID-19 patients when they are admitted to the hospital as well as people in the intensive care unit who are in need of critical care.

“I am fortunate to be in a major tertiary hospital with an infectious disease physician who was guiding us during this chaotic time vs. my fellow hospital medicine doctors who work in small or rural hospitals who are on their own,” North says. “As little was known for treatment plans and complications at that early time, we were all having significant daily anxiety and insomnia, knowing we had to treat a disease without any guidance.”

She spent every available moment reading articles and reports to learn more about discoveries being made in relation to COVID-19 as it was coming out of Italy. This led to her feeling as though she was never “off work” because of the constantly changing information and the need to be as informed as possible.

Because of early intervention, COVID-19 didn’t spread widely within the community, she says. “But the effects of the anxiety and insomnia of those early days are longlasting. I can’t even imagine the mental effects on healthcare workers in hard-hit areas. Just the prospects of potentially getting to maximum capacity and chaos and rationing care was stressful enough, let alone working through it.”

North says that among healthcare workers, “when you combine the emotional trauma of continually experiencing death, the emotional roller coaster of each day processing both successes and poor outcomes, with sleep deprivation and high student debt burden, it’s an inevitable combination leading to PTSD and suicide.”

She fears the accelerated effects the pandemic may have on her colleagues in harder-hit areas.

JILLIAN HEIDENREICH ’22 MONROE, WISCONSIN