Alumni Interview: Andrew Belyea '13

I’m a third year medical student at Queen’s University in Kingston.

As a medical student, has the shape of your learning changed since March? If so, how?
During the final two years of medical school, you work hands-on in the hospitals seeing patients with the care team. Because we are classified as students and not yet independent physicians, the university opted to keep us safe and pulled us from clinical duties. That has meant a rapid shift to online learning and pursuing research opportunities, which many students were already doing on the side.

Hospital policies and procedures are changing every day, so it is fascinating from that perspective. I was in Ottawa when our student clinical duties were suspended and was lucky to have a walk-through of how potential COVID-19 cases were going to travel through the emergency room early on in the response effort. The doctor I was working with at the time looked at me and expressed how interesting the entire process was to him - it was entirely new to all of us. Doctors don’t normally think about how patients physically travel through an emergency department to minimize contact with others. It made me appreciate the importance of having clever and flexible teammates working together since this was new for everyone. From the start to the shift to the end of a shift, the team leader would explain how processes and protocols were improving hour by hour, which is fascinating and heartening.

You were recently interviewed by the Kingston Whig Standard in relation to COVID-19. What was the article about?  
I had done research in 2017 on the Spanish Flu in Kingston, which has come up more recently because of comparisons to COVID-19. The Spanish Flu was a particularly bad flu virus in 1918-1920, spreading at the tail end of World War I as soldiers travelled home. There were an estimated 20-50 million deaths, and it is believed upwards of one-third of the global population was infected. Without a good understanding of what caused the virus (the microscope wasn’t invented until the 1930s), there was little to do but try and keep people self-isolated. Sound familiar? It’s interesting how we have come so far with medical research in the 102 years since then, and yet novel viruses continue to wreak havoc. The challenge is that each new virus is exactly that - new. That leaves us effectively starting from scratch with research and vaccine development with each virus.

What skills do you think our SJK students will develop as they travel through this time of self-isolation and remote learning that will be of benefit to them once life 'gets back to normal’?  
I’m seeing a huge push for connecting more with technology. It was an important part of life pre-COVID-19, but now it may become the standard. For example, Queen’s University offers a fully online bachelor’s of health science undergraduate program and that may become more the norm as we innovate ways to deliver education effectively online. Medically, the concepts of telemedicine and telehealth are taking off right now. It’s the idea of phoning your doctor and meeting virtually rather than face-to-face. It’s already being used commonly in more remote communities, but I have no doubt it will become significantly more common. It won’t replace the traditional in-person nature of medicine, but it can help make things significantly more efficient if executed properly.