While recovering from a planned surgery, Dr. Potters took some time to reflect on where we are five years post-pandemic. Here is what he had to say…
The treadmill is jacked up to max incline, the belt is spinning like a jet engine, and I’ve been sprinting blindfolded with bricks tied to my feet. There’s no pause button, no time-out, just this relentless grind where everyone’s too damn busy to think. Business gurus preach reflection like some holy grail of success, but who the hell has time when the wheels keep turning, the inbox keeps bloating, and life demands more at every turn? And yet, here I am, yanked off the ride by a surgeon’s blade, a belly full of holes, doped up (on Tylenol) and immobile-forced into an unscheduled existential timeout.
Five Years Later: Have We Learned Anything?
March 2025. Five years since the world stopped. Five years since New York turned into a war zone of ventilators and body bags. Five years since the blind panic, the makeshift ICUs, the medical MacGyvering that saved lives in ways we weren’t supposed to talk about. Five years since we became warriors instead of physicians, tacticians instead of scientists, gamblers instead of administrators. We fought, we adapted, we survived.
I had sort of forgotten all this, caught on the treadmill like everyone else, but the news cycle and its nostalgia-baiting anniversary pieces dragged me back. And from my sidelined position, it has taken on more meaning than it otherwise would have. I vividly recall how hard we worked, how we held things together with duct tape and willpower. I also remember attending, against everyone’s advice, the March 10th, 2020, MSG concert of the ‘Brothers,’ a tribute to the Allman Brothers that tore the roof off the place the night before the pandemic was officially called. Got away lucky that night, but as they say, music is the heroin of the soul, and some things just can’t be missed.
I remember those first days vividly-waking up to another briefing about supply chains, triage protocols, and death counts. We didn’t have the luxury of panic; we barely had the luxury of sleep. Shifts blended into each other, and we ran on adrenaline and whatever caffeine we could find. The city had never been quieter, yet inside the hospitals, it was all alarms and chaos.
Somehow, we figured it out. We created makeshift ICUs in hallways. We threw out rulebooks that no longer made sense and built new ones overnight. We collapsed bureaucracies because there was no other choice, and for once, medicine felt like it was moving at the speed it needed to. Decisions were made in real-time-treatment protocols, staffing rotations, emergency response. It was terrifying. It was inspiring. It worked.
The Collapse of Trust
For a fleeting moment, we had something-real unity, real change, the kind of forced efficiency that only existential terror can bring. And at the core of it all, trust. Trust in ourselves to show up every day and do what needed to be done. Trust in each other-nurses, techs, respiratory therapists, aides, doctors-moving as a single organism in the fight for survival. And maybe, for a fleeting moment, we even had trust in institutions, that they could act decisively and with purpose when everything was on the line.
But trust is fragile. It takes time to build, but seconds to destroy. And in the aftermath, when we should have fortified that trust, we pissed it away. We turned against one another. We built echo chambers instead of common ground. We replaced nuance with outrage and turned uncertainty into ammunition. Society didn’t just fracture-it atomized. Public trust in institutions tanked, trust in each other eroded, and self-trust-well, how can you trust yourself when reality itself has become subjective?
We had a shot. A rare, once-in-a-generation moment to rebuild. To strip away the dead weight and make something real, something better. Instead, we doubled down on our worst instincts. We had a playbook for progress, and we tore it up in favor of denial and delusion. We are not stronger. We are not wiser. We are not better. We are just angrier, more fragmented, and more willing than ever to burn it all down rather than admit we could have done things differently.
We Ain’t Ready for Sh*t
And now, as we have emerged from the wreckage of COVID, we stand at the precipice of our biggest challenge yet: the dawn of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Say what you will, whether you believe the hype or the timeline, whether it will be great or terrible for humanity-who the hell knows. But depending on which expert you trust, we are anywhere from 24 to 60 months away from AGI making its entrance. And if we’ve learned anything from COVID, it’s that we are spectacularly unprepared for moments of transformation-especially with the tsunami of change bearing down on us from the crumbling neoliberal world order into the new hegemonic mercantilism that now defines our reality.
AGI is coming, and it will reshape what it means to be human. The workforce will be rewritten, institutions will be restructured, and trust, which is already hanging by a thread, will be tested in ways we can’t even imagine. Who do we trust in an era when machines can outthink, outpredict, and outperform us? Will we trust each other, or will we fracture further? Will we trust ourselves, or will we cede decision-making to entities we don’t understand?
A Path Forward?
How do we move forward-if we have the stomach for it? The path isn’t paved in nostalgia or rage, but in something far less sexy: collective responsibility. Michael Sandel called it in The Tyranny of Merit-the false idol of individual achievement has left us in the dust, convinced that success is purely personal and failure is always deserved. We took that ideology and ran with it, convinced we could bootstrap our way out of societal collapse. Turns out, we can’t. Turns out, we need each other.
And not that there is any one answer, but we need to start having those discussions about what forms a common good. One that doesn’t pit each other against us, but recognizes that both are essential to a functioning society. One that doesn’t let tech billionaires hijack the future while the people who kept hospitals running during the pandemic are discarded like yesterday’s PPE.
We have to start talking to each other again. Lower the volume. Learn from each other. Listen instead of waiting for your turn to talk. Because, in the end, without each other, we are nothing. Our box score is low, our past performance an embarrassment. The time bomb is ticking, and well, as for me, having hit the pit stop for a short while, I hope this opportunity is not wasted.
As Ed Koch, a former Mayor of NYC, would say, ask me in a few months ‘How I’m doin’? Hopefully, not back at full speed on the treadmill. As for all of us-hold on tight. The ride is going to be bumpy, and that’s coming from an optimist.
The rat race isn’t just winning-it’s devouring us whole. And the only thing left to do is ask: Do we want to find a way out, or do we just want to keep running?
Louis Potters
Department Chairman
Northwell Health
Lake Success NY
