I'm An Infectious Disease Doctor Yet I Couldn't Protect My Family From The Delta Variant

"Our only hope for moving into the fall with any degree of normalcy is to better protect unvaccinated kids under 12. Here's what you should know."

My job as a public health physician is to protect your family from COVID-19 — and I should have been able to protect my own. Studying this novel virus and educating the public about it has consumed my days since early 2020, which made it especially troubling when my husband, my son and I contracted the Delta variant of COVID-19 last month. In December 2019, I was working as the director of infection prevention at a large academic health system in Singapore. On New Year’s Eve, while most of the world remained unaware of the looming danger, I learned about a new respiratory syndrome from my emerging infectious disease network. We were hearing troubling news about the syndrome and began safety preparations at the hospital in January 2020, while we were also struggling to understand more about it. In the hospital, we used strict infection prevention protocols (you can read more about them here and here) to prevent transmission. We opened an emergency department for suspected COVID-19 cases in an open-air tent, without high-tech air handling systems. Despite seeing thousands of patients there, we had no transmission of the virus among any of our staff.