When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit New York back in the spring of 2020, a thirty-two-year-old family medicine doctor named Peter was a resident at an in-patient hospital and intensive care unit upstate. In those early days, the young physician would wake up around 4:15 in the morning for sixteen-hour shifts filled with death and human suffering on a level that strained even his practiced medical detachment.

“Eventually, the overall volume of death starts to register, and then even if you can disconnect, it’s still like, ‘Holy shit, that’s a lot of people dying,’ and it gets to you,’” he tells us.

It’s been more than a year since the first two pandemic surges. America has a new president, Joe Biden, who promised to get America back on track. But Peter says little has changed as the country faces another wave of the virus driven by the more infectious Delta variant.