In the fall of 2019, Dr. Silverman wrote a Director’s Corner column on Crisis Management and Recognition for ER docs, basically discussing how and when to raise the warning flags to administration and how to effectively manage the crisis. It was one of about 150 columns he’d written since 2007 on routine leadership and management issues that ER medical directors face.  Little did he know, he would be using some of those strategies to escalate his concerns about COVID to the hospital chief medical officer after seeing a story in late January 2020 that China built a hospital in a week.  No one had ever done that before and if they were doing it, he realized they had something bad going on.  

Over the next 6 weeks, Dr. Silverman was helping his ER and hospital prepare for the pandemic, spending about 4 hours a day in COVID meetings and the rest of the waking hours thinking and learning about COVID.  As the info was still unfolding in other parts of the country and before Northern Virginia started to really see patients, Dr. Silverman had a conversation with the hospital PR team about the importance of telling the story from the healthcare perspective.  If this was a war, there would be reporters embedded with soldiers.  But because of privacy laws and because COVID was so new and healthcare workers don’t want to show any potential hint of an error, initially no one allowed cameras into hospitals. 

So, the story was being told by politicians. Now, let’s get to March 13th, the lockdown was upon us, and Dr. Silverman and his wife had just gone to their local Giant to do a grocery run before avoiding the stores for two weeks.  After a glass of wine or two, he put out a short Facebook post giving an “Update from the Giant,” It was meant as a joke and talked about the store being out of meat and comfort food but having plenty of vegetables. Then he realized that writing about the ER and helping people understand what’s going on would be much more valuable than a description of the grocery store.  The first Friday Night Update was shortly after the update from Giant, was 165 words, and mostly said that COVID is here, stay home, don’t come to the ER to get tested because there are no tests, though we are here if you get sick and need us, and that people should listen to scientists.  After about a month of writing Friday Night Updates, he woke up one Saturday morning and saw an email from the hospital Vice President of Business Development.  By this time, a couple of ER docs around the country had been fired for speaking up about their hospitals “lack of” response to COVID and Dr. Silverman figured if he wasn’t getting fired, he was at least getting a cease-and-desist order to stop posting on Facebook.  Funny enough, the message from the hospital was fully supportive.  

Very quickly, he was asked to make his posts public and then had requests to allow people to follow him.  Dr. Silverman continued writing on Friday Nights with the goal of bringing apolitical, scientific information to the table as well as give the community a sense of what’s going on in the ER.  The final line of each Facebook post includes “Science Matters.”  As we continue to move forward, it’s critical that we realize how important science is and to continue to follow the science.  

He currently has over 8000 followers on Facebook. You can follow him here.