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It was an email to a few dozen colleagues that has now spread to doctors nationwide. “This event is unlike anything we have lived through before,” Dr. Brent Wolfrom’s message began. “It is likely that at some point we will transition from an acute to chronic crisis mentality.”

Wolfrom is a family doctor and former medical officer with the Canadian Armed Forces who completed two deployments to Afghanistan. “I’m starting to equate so much of what’s going on now to my experiences over there,” he says over the phone from Kingston.

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Stress, uncertainty, social isolation. Periods of crisis punctuated by calm. “The absolute lack of social interaction focused on anything other than the mission, and a lot of death,” says Wolfrom, postgraduate program director for family medicine at Queen’s University.

“We don’t know how all of this is going to shape up,” he says. The images from Italy of crematoriums that can’t keep up with the bodies, and army convoys escorting coffins out of devastated towns; the harrowing anecdotes of doctors forced to decide which life is worth saving more. “Quite frankly, it looks absolutely terrible,” Wolfrom says. “We’re all hoping it doesn’t happen here, but it’s possible.”