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The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way patients were treated. Cardiological examinations, which often involved prolonged contact with patients, were carried out wearing specially adapted clothing designed to protect the carers, not the patients, from contamination. Restrictions on visits by relatives to hospitalized patients have given a new dimension to the relationship between carer and patient during the hospital stay. The imbalances linked to these changes, which have generally been overcome, underline the importance of the relationship between carers and patients, and the need to preserve it in an ever more technology-intensive medical system, lest we lose its human dimension.