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On Saturday, March 14, Avery Thompson and 650 other medical students at the University of California, San Francisco, received an email: Clinical classes were going online and planned hours in the hospital were being put on ice. The spread of the novel coronavirus posed too big a threat for courses to continue in person. In conversations with friends, she said, We were all experiencing similar frustration at feeling like we werent able to do very much. Within hours, the second year medical student received another message. This time, from her peers. It linked to a Google Doc, where medical students and pupils from other UCSF programspharmaceuticals, PhD studentswere drumming up ways to make themselves useful to the medical community. Within days, almost 200 students offered help, 120 from the medical school alone.

It really just sort of snowballed, said Hope Schwartz, a first year medical student at UCSF. And people started reaching out and coming up with other great ideas. Some suggested running a blood drive, others planned to redraft public health information for the multi-lingual San Francisco Bay Area, and track down other industries that use personal protective equipmentconstruction companies and nail salons.

Students have had the bandwidth to plan out a lot more, Dr. John Davis, associate dean of curriculum at the medical school said. They mobilized immediately, as soon as Covid-19 became an issue.

As the official number of coronavirus infections begin to skyrocketon Monday, it was 35,000; 70,000 on Thursday, and by Friday afternoon there were over 100,000 casesthe nations healthcare apparatus has reorganized itself to face the pandemic head on. Non-essential surgeries are being cancelled, and hospitals are pleading with the public to abide by CDC recommendations of social distancing and hand-washing in an effort to prevent overwhelming medical services. For medical schools, still in the middle of the academic year, clinical rotations have ground to a halt. Many instructors are too busy on the frontlines to teach, and the presence of untrained medical students could worsen supply shortages or accidentally spread the disease. Meanwhile, schools have tried to react to a quickly-changing health emergency without losing sight of their responsibility to educate future doctors.

These new conditionshave fundamentallychanged the lives of the nations 30,000 medical students in two ways. First, course curriculums have reshaped themselves to fit into a world disrupted by the pandemic. Second, the coronavirus has offered studentsan opportunity to provide ancillary support for frontline healthcare workers. Across the country, students are organizing themselves to meet the specific needs of the medical community in creative ways: from babysitting for nurses to 3D printing personal protective equipment, like masks.

For many,the crisis goes to the heart of why theywanted to be doctors in the first place. I do feel that medical students go to medical school mostly because we want be helpful, says Orly Farber, a third year medical student at Stanford Medical School. We dont write that in our essays because its too simplistic a reason, but its reality. At Stanford, medical students are providing childcare, running errands, and going grocery shopping for the doctors and nurses whose days are fully devoted to fighting the virus. Farber thinks its possible their role may even be expanded by being asked to take clinical notes, make phone calls to patients, and help with orders, all tasks can be handled remotely.

In other schools, where shortages of equipment are also a concern, students are turning to technological solutions. With the materials necessary for homemade masks in short supply, students at the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and the University of North Carolina School of Medicine have started 3D printing face shields, which can be mass produced. Theyre cheap and easy and the most extreme thing youd need, says Diana Dayal, a fourth year student at UNCSM. If anything, were making the more robust product. Some of the 170 student volunteers from UNCSM and adjacent programs are also working as hall monitors, helping medical workers properly don and doxput on and take offprotective equipment to prevent contamination. Some Rutgers students are running a hotline at the New Jersey Poison Control Center to set the record straight for callers whove been inundated with misinformation about the pandemic.

For the public, even the right information can be difficult to interpret. Students from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine are collaborating with their counterparts at New York University and the Pittsburgh Center for Autistic Advocacy to rewrite Centers for Disease Control guidelines. Were working as a collective effort to take these CDC guidelines and distill them down to different reading levels, so theyre accessible for a broader audience, said Ben Zuchelkowski, a fourth year medical student at Pittsburgh. Once the new guidelines are ready, he hopes his colleagues can disseminate them nationally.

All of the students I spoke to emphasizedthat they were able to expand beyond their institutions to collaborate with others around the country.Across messaging applications like Slack, video conferencing services like Zoom, plus Twitter and Google Drive, student bodies have stayed intouch. Were sharing ideas with each other, doing conference calls once we make a connection, says Zuchelkowski. Its really been a robust organizational effort nationally. Theres even Google file called Schmeddit, where everyone can keep up to date on which programs are closed or have affiliated hospitals with confirmed Covid-19 patients.

Meanwhile, medical schools are quickly rewriting curriculums to lean on the same remote communication tools. For students at UCSF, classroom courses rapidly moved to distance and remote learning methods, said Dr. Davis. Those are things we could deploy quick. Its the same story at most other medical schools. But thats where the similarities end. We dont have a nationally standardized curriculum, he said. Every medical school has, for all intents and purposes, its own curriculum. Each interruption in clinic and classroom activities has to be contextualizedand thats where real complexities occur.

Those complexities become even more fraught in the clinical setting, where students spend the majority of their thirdand some of their fourthyears. Given the severity of the pandemic, clinical rotationswhen students experience aspects of the profession, like surgery or primary care, in 4 to 8-week incrementshave been cancelled for now.

So, how do you teach medical students to become doctors when their presence in a hospital is a health risk? Theres no clear sense of how this school is going to deal with it, said Krunal Amin, a second year medical student at Duke University School of Medicine, where classes have been cancelled until June 15. At UCSF, Dr. Davis said faculty are discussing shifting clinical education from being time-based to competency-based, allowing for a bit more freedom. In cases where thats not possible, hes proposed uncoupling courses. Instead of classroom instruction and hospital hours happening simultaneously, for instance, the first comes now, the latter after the virus subsides. Avery Thompson, the UCSF second year, said Theyre making the best out of a pretty bad situation, and I do appreciate that.

Still, not everything can simply be rescheduled. Dayal says one crucial exam, which third years take to determine where theyll spend their first years as doctors, has been cancelled. This week, most schools typically have Match Day, a celebration where fourth years learn what that determination is. This year, celebrations moved from auditoriums illuminated in camera flash to email inboxes.

Graduation ceremonies have been cancelled, but some medical schools in Boston and New York have enlisted their fourth year students to start practicing. On Tuesday, NYUs medical programsent out an emailannouncingthat it would graduate some of its fourth year students three months earlier than planned, so they could join the healthcare workforce prior to the typical June 1 starting date. New York City faces the highest concentration of infections in the nation, and NYU University Medical Center is at the center of it all.

That need is trickling down to younger students, too. Last week, North Carolinas Department of Health and Human Serviceswhich has COVID-19 test samples but not enough technicians to process themsought out students with lab experience who could help expedite the work. Similarly, the Allegheny County Medical Reserve Corps has reached out to students to help bolster numbers.

I feel in the coming weeks were going to need backups to assist an overwhelmed healthcare workforce, said Farber, at Stanford Medicine. Medical students can help reinforce the frontline.

The reality of being in the midst of a deadly pandemic, with many healthcare workers struggling to get basic supplies, and no clear end in sight has created demands that are daunting to even seasoned physicians. I asked Diana Dayal, the UNCSM student, if she ever second guessed her choice to pursue medicine. Absolutely not, she said. I think its inspiring to have a skill setto really be there for people at their darkest time, even if on a pandemic scale.

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Med Students Aren't Sitting Out the Fight Against the Coronavirus - Mother Jones