After an extremely difficult eleven months, ER doctors and nurses at local hospitals are finally seeing their jobs become less stressful as their understanding of the enemy they have been battling continues to improve, writes Wendy Ruderman for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

While hospitals are still swamped with coronavirus patients, they are younger and less sick. They also no longer wait until the last moment to go to a hospital.

There are also significantly fewer deaths as well. Despite an increase in COVID-19 patients during December and early January at Suburban Community Hospital in Norristown, the hospital’s death rate has fallen from around 40 percent last spring to around 3 percent now.

Additionally, there are also more treatment options available, such as monoclonal antibodies.

As one ER doctor at Suburban put it in Star Trek terms, “the shields are up and activated.”

After a lot of uncertainty since the beginning of the pandemic, people are starting to see light at the end of the tunnel.

“We can see the evolution of the hope,” said Dr. Mathew Mathew, chief medical officer at Suburban.

Read more about Suburban Community Hospital at The Philadelphia Inquirer by clicking here.