I disagree with this take. I'll power level here slightly. Memorization will not carry you through medical school let alone the MCAT. Do you need to be able to retain alot of info for say the MCAT or step 1 (the first major exam in med school)? Yes. That's just the starting point though, the real thing is in being able to critically apply all that retained info as needed. Step 2, which is now weighted more heavily for residency matching is focused more on clinical aspects than rote memorization. Residency is a whole other ball game and to be frank you will forget anything not directly or tangentially related to your scope of practice. This is why your average surgeon like an orthopedic only knows like 3 antibiotics at best because they're min maxed.
On the topic of Covid, most physicians working at a hospital are following what're called protocols for care (some places have a different name but it's the same thing)and to be frank people without medical training/licenses are practicing medicine by limiting what physicians can and can't prescribe. Another thing to note is that your average physician, (residents even more despite federal caps) at a hospital is doing 40 - 60 hours a week and isn't always looking at the most pertinent research, this is why your average doc is like roughly a decade behind all the cutting edge research. So what do they do? They look to the NEH and look at guidelines they provide, there was a startling failure in the institutional front with respect to covid. At the start it was all chaos, i'm a med/drug fag and worked with drug targeting for it and even being plugged in it was hard to get your bearings straight at the start.