COVID-19: Thankful On-Call ID Doc Paged Only 43,589 Times Today

BOSTON, MA – Despite America coming to a screeching halt at the hands of a pandemic caused by novel coronavirus COVID-19, a very thankful infectious diseases physician/epidemiologist who is on call at Massachusetts Specific Hospital reports being paged only 43,589 times today.

“I went into Infectious Diseases for a reason and I’m only happy to help allay any anxieties and field any questions regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, we are here to help,” admitted Dr. Leanne Burton of Infectious Diseases, who has been on-call at her hospital ever since the outbreak started. “That being said, I am thrilled to report that my pager went off only 43,589 times today. That’s a new low. A pretty quiet day by ID standards. It’s like I wasn’t even working today.”

Of all health care subspecialists who carry pagers, infectious diseases specialists are the most prone to status pagericus, a condition in which pages occur so close together the person carrying the pager doesn’t have time to recover between pages. They are constantly getting paged about fevers and bacteremias and antibiotic approvals. And that was before the coronavirus outbreak.

According to Burton, she said prior to COVID-19 she averaged approximately 15,000 pages a day while on service. Approximately 25% of those pagers occur when she is in the bathroom. Though Burton hasn’t officially tallied the numbers, she believes roughly all of the 43,589 pages today pertained to COVID-19.

Burton says she has no regrets circulating her personal cell phone number to the American public so that anyone can reach her about anything, COVID-19-related or not, at any hour of the day. “It’s what we do,” Burton said with a smile.