Echoes of the Pandemic: Five years after lockdowns began, ER doctor JJ Hoff shares his reflections

In our new series Echoes of the Pandemic, North Carolina’s health care, government, and education leaders reflect on the early days of the COVID-19 crisis and the lessons that continue to shape their work five years after the lockdowns began. 

Dr. JJ Hoff is now an emergency medicine specialist at Duke University Hospital. But in 2020, he was still in training, working as a resident in the ER. He shares stories about the cases that have stayed with him, and how health care workers coped with what was once unthinkable. 

Interview Highlights

On treating patients when visitor restrictions were in place:

"I think the worst part of that was having to call a family member and try to put them on speaker phone and have a last conversation with their loved one. I think what has stuck with me the most is sitting there holding a phone and listening to a spouse tell their loved one that, you know we're at home, but we're thinking of you and we love you and they're hoping for the best, but it was just so impersonal. It didn't feel right, and it still doesn't feel right."

On living with memories:

"Because I work in the same place where I dealt with a lot of the sickest patients I saw during COVID, you have flashbacks to things or people you saw, or cases you had and things you did that exist. I think that there is definitely a camaraderie amongst those of us who worked during COVID, and we still tell stories all the time to each other. I mean, it's totally not comparable, but it feels kind of like war stories."

On doctors leaving the profession after 2020:

"Hundreds of thousands to a million people died in this country from this thing, and it feels like people just sort of forgot that that happened, and I think that definitely breeds a little bit of cynicism in a lot of people. There was a big wave of a lot of older ER docs who left the profession, and then even probably younger ones too found different things to do and left. And I would not blame them in the slightest for that, because it was a lot. But like as a trainee, I wanted to be an emergency doctor more than anything in the world, and I still do."

*Editor's note: This transcription has been lightly edited for clarity.