TR: How are you advising patients on COVID-19 vaccination?
Dr. Morris: We very strongly support patients getting flu shots and pneumonia shots—the shingles vaccination. I’ve not had anybody ask me really about the COVID vaccination. If it becomes available, I can guarantee I’ll be one of the first people up there—if I look at the data, and the vaccination looks good.
TR: Have guidelines for social distancing affected work in your office?
Dr. Morris: Some, but not a lot. We make sure we’re all wearing masks, and the patients are told to wear a mask or we won’t let them in the office. We’ve also told people to please space out. That’s why the kiosk is very nice, because we can literally know a patient’s temperature and whether they’re wearing a mask in two seconds. So that means there’s better flow [at the entrance], and we don’t have a line half way down the street outside our office.
We have separated seats in our waiting area for the lab—they’re easily six feet apart. Similarly in the X-ray area, we’ve spread out the seating.
TR: What lessons have you learned from the pandemic?
Dr. Morris: The first thing is that when we have new viruses, we have to be fluid in what we do. We are going to learn over time what works and what doesn’t work. And maybe from our experiences now we can look at things and do a better job of preparing for the future.
I’ll be curious to see what happens with the new anti-virals, and I’d like to see also how things go with the new vaccinations. Because of the push to find new treatments, we are actually seeing a lot more knowledge than we ever had about viruses in general and about this virus, the coronavirus family, and that’s going to help. The more we learn from this virus, the more we’ll be able to apply that at a future time.
Kimberly J. Retzlaff is a freelance medical journalist based in Denver.
