Musings of a primary care triage nurse:

1. “Isolation means you aren’t around others. No, you shouldn’t be eating dinner with your family or watching TV with them.”

2. “You’ve been sick for the past week but didn’t get tested. Yes, COVID can just be symptoms like a cold or that sinus thing you get each year.”

3. “The majority of those that are hospitalized are unvaccinated. I know ‘someone’ told you that’s not true, but that is not what we see each day.”

4. “Yes, you can have a few days of side effects after vaccination, but it is not worse than COVID itself.”

5. “No, we will not prescribe ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. Why? Because the studies so far do not show that it helps outcomes for those with COVID infection.”

6. “The vaccine does not give you COVID. I know you got COVID a few days after you were vaccinated, but that is because of your activities and contacts, not because of the vaccine. Scientifically impossible.”

7. “If the tests say you are positive, you are. It does not need to be repeated. Kinda like a pregnancy test.”

8. “You do not need to go to the ER. You are not sick enough to need care there.”

9. “You didn’t get vaccinated? (FDA approved) But you want to get monoclonal antibodies? (Emergency use authorization; still considered experimental).”

10. “I know that you were sick in the fall of 2019, but I can assure you that you did not have COVID. People much smarter than myself, or you, or even the doctors here, other people who have studied infectious disease and epidemiology their entire lives would disagree with you. Yes, I know that you’ve never been sick like that before, but it wasn’t COVID.”

Sigh.

The author is an anonymous nurse.