For two years I have watched in horror as the people

 I clocked out from my final COVID shift last week. For the past two years, I have done it all when it comes to the patients in our COVID inbox: screening for who gets tests when tests were rationed, triaging who should stay home when care was rationed, prioritizing who gets vaccines when vaccines were rationed, and deciding who gets treatments when treatments were rationed. Decisions made by those in power have affected every aspect of the health care we could offer, and the resultant toll on health care workers has been immeasurable. Health care workers are not OK.

As the transition back to “normal” begins, our clinics — echoing the rest of the nation — are moving toward a new stage of the pandemic. A stage where the role of the COVID-19 care provider is dissolved and absorbed into the umbrella of primary care, where a collective problem gets shoved onto the individual, and where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, our nation’s foremost health protection agency, places the burden of risk calculation onto millions of immunocompromised people by advising them to “talk to their health care provider” about masking and what measures they should take to stay safe. The CDC is essentially washing its hands of any policy-level responsibility to support or protect those who are most vulnerable.

Never mind the millions of uninsured people who don’t have primary care providers. Never mind the fact that talking to your provider first requires overcoming the barriers of a visit and a copay. In other words, in place of guidelines, it’s “talk to your health care provider.”

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So we have moved on to the “live with it” part of the pandemic, even though more than 1,000 Americans a day are still in the “die with it” part of the pandemic. And with this push toward individual responsibility, we shift the burden onto individual clinics and onto already overstretched primary care clinicians who face the daunting task of trying to get antivirals to patients with COVID within the first five days of symptoms. It’s a task that can be achieved in well-staffed, patient-centered, functional health care systems. Ask your doctor whether we have one of those.