Covid-19: Don’t forget the impact on US family physicians

As covid-19 continues its exponential growth in parts of the United States, we have heard a great deal in the media about brave, exhausted emergency room doctors and staff.1 2 Very little that I have seen, however, has focused on a much larger group of doctors who are also on the front lines of the war against covid-19: those who deliver primary care. In the US there are more than twice as many family doctors as ER doctors and almost three times as many pediatricians, most of whom work exclusively in primary care.3 Altogether there are more than five times more primary care doctors than ER doctors, and that is not counting general internists, many of whom in the US are …