Since the start of the pandemic, more than 370,000 Americans have died of Covid-19, many of them alone, isolated from those who love them by hospital policies cutting off family visits.

As the virus continues its relentless spread across the country, the next few months may be the deadliest ones we’ve seen. And as hospitals once again begin to shut their doors to visitors, we are in dire need of national leadership around visitor policies and medical communication with patients and families.

Much has been said about preventable deaths related to Covid-19. Little has been said about preventable suffering. We may today be better prepared to diagnose and treat the disease than we were in the spring, but we are no better prepared to address the collective trauma of Covid-19 patients being separated from their families. Family presence at the bedside, along with regular communication between health care providers and their patients and families, are not indulgences — they need to be part of the standard of care.

If we fail to act now, the pain of losing loved ones as they die in isolation will be a grim legacy of this pandemic.

There was, for example, an exception that allowed a brief hospital visit for family members at the very end of a patient’s life. At the time, this exception applied only to patients who decided to transition to comfort-focused care and, in many cases, stop life support.

But rather than helping families say goodbye, the exception became a form of coercion. Families could visit only if their loved one transitioned away from life-sustaining measures. Even then, only two visitors were allowed, creating difficult choices for patients with a spouse and three adult children.

There hasn’t been time to collect robust data on the longer-term effects of Covid-19 deaths on family bereavement. Yet we have reason to be concerned. Research consistently demonstrates the risks of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and complicated grief in family members of patients who die in ICUs. The added stress of having to wait by the phone for terrible updates or trying to navigate the myriad communication and visitation challenges wrought by Covid-19 will likely only deepen the trauma that families experience.

As the nation braces for the coming months, we need a national strategy to mitigate this suffering. All hospitals must create programs to regularly allow families to see and talk to their loved ones throughout their hospitalization. The inequitable chaos of the status quo — usually a nurse scrambling to arrange a video chat, often on her or his personal phone — is unacceptable. Nearly 10 months into the pandemic, we should not still be trying to figure this out.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should create transparent, evidence-based standards for visitor policies that are tied to rates of viral spread. To be sure, with skyrocketing infections across the country, we cannot return to pre-Covid-19 visitation rules.

To start, hospitals in communities with lower rates of positive Covid-19 tests should be more open to visitors, and all hospitals in the same community should have the same policies. Moreover, for the critically ill, visitation policies should have enough flexibility to avoid coercive transitions to comfort-focused care.

With regard to communication, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations should devise regulations about connecting patients with their families when they can’t be at the bedside. If hospitals can’t allow daily visitation, they should proactively offer families daily access to video and phone visits. Patients who are awake, alert, and have their own smartphones or tablets wouldn’t need assistance, but hospitals should step in to meet the needs of patients who cannot communicate on their own or lack communication devices.

Hospitals need to hire or repurpose staff to ensure regular and equitable patient-family communication, as ours did at the time. Patient care associates, certified nurse assistants, or medical assistants could be trained and compensated for managing this large and important task. Due to the financial hardships of employing extra staff to do this, they should allow a family member or trusted friend to sit at their bedside. If nurses can go in and out of covid patient rooms and then return to their family and friends at the end of the day, family should be an exception.