The So my name is Danny Midland. I am an ER doc at Providence Alaska Medical Center in

Anchorage. Not actually employed by Providence and I should make that clear that

number one my group Alaska Emergency Medicine Associates

is independently is contracted by Providence and I'm speaking today not as a representative

of Providence or for that matter as a representative of AEMA, but I'm more speaking on my own experience and my own views and certainly the offensive views are entirely my own.

In terms of how we and I are doing with COVID, I guess there's sort of a couple of answers to that, you know, on one level, there is, you know, there's the personal of it and a lot of that is what everyone is dealing with. It's you know we have two small

kids and my wife and I are both in medicine and are dealing with you know our kids are still in

daycare and there's COVID cases and we're grateful to have the daycare

because otherwise one of us would have to leave work and so there's all the stress on the home front and then there's certainly

There's a shift at work that's been a pretty sustained shift for you know the entire course of this pandemic and it's varied in its intensity, but the, you know, work, especially in the emergency department, is always a balance of fun and stress or fun and fear depending on what's going on.

And I think the pandemic has really shifted that for a lot of us. You know I think for most of us it's usually mostly fun and I think it's really become

mostly stress a lot of the time. So that's sort of the personal side of it. And then there's also this sort of how is the hospital doing with it and how is our department doing with it.

And I would say, you know, I mean, our heads are above water. We got, I want to say we got really lucky, but it wasn't luck. I mean Alaskans really stepped up and you know some of it was mandated but a lot of it was really people doing what was asked of them and

if you think back way way all the way back to April and May we were trying to

flatten the curve right and I think that that concept was a little, you know, people said the

words that we didn't necessarily make it clear what that meant, that like the area

under the curve doesn't change when you flatten it, meaning like the total burden of disease that we deal with doesn't change,

but you flatten that spike such that you don't drastically exceed our ability to deal with it and our available resources and our supplies.

And we did that.

I mean, really in Alaska, we did that and I mean, it would be hard to express how indebted we are to our community for doing that and our gratitude that everyone really stepped up and did that.

That's a really hard thing to sustain.

We did it when it was most critical. I think now we're struggling a little bit more and there's sort of more push back and I get it right I mean

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