One recent evening, I was in my apartment getting ready for my night shift in the Cardiac Care Unit at a major hospital in New York City. It was 7 p.m., two hours before my first shift, and I was recounting how many patients were admitted in the unit with acute hypoxic respiratory failure due to Covid-19. As thoughts about the coronavirus tumbled in my mind, someone outside began hollering and banging pots. The cacophony surged, the voices multiplying and echoing through the air.

I looked out of the window and over the hill that my apartment rested on, gazing at a part of the Bronx that sprawled before me. The bellowing seemed to be coming from the apartments below. “The world has gone mad,” I thought. It wasn’t surprising that, given the current state of affairs, people had decided to start screaming en masse.

Only later did I learn, from a video on Instagram, that I had witnessed an act of solidarity with health care workers. At first, as a first-year resident in internal medicine, I felt joy and appreciation. We’re notoriously overworked and underpaid, our labor repeatedly exploited. We’re at the bottom of the physician hierarchy, often excluded from decisions that impact us and pacified with Friday pizza days, superficially cheery emails from hospital leadership, and “committees” designed to listen but not act on our raised concerns. Only 10 months into my three-year medical training, I was already feeling dispirited, so I welcomed the gratitude.

But a part of the narrative soon began to disturb me. Lionizing slogans—“Health Care Heroes,” “Thank you for risking your life for us,” “Salute our brave soldiers”—are becoming popular at a time when conditions for health care workers are worsening by the day. When our society’s appreciation for health care workers swells into a kind of hero-worship, it becomes too easy to avoid confronting the structural failures that have been exposed by this pandemic.

In 1884, Friedrich Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England, a sweeping critique of Europe’s Industrial Revolution. The German philosopher laid bare the dreadful working conditions of urban English workers in the shadow of rapid urbanization and industrialization, connecting their long hours of work in unsafe environments to the exponential spread of infectious disease, unprecedented levels of malnutrition, and dismal livelihoods. The analysis Engels offered was ultimately one of capitalism: