The Biggest Worry for Doctors Fighting the Pandemic

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He admitted that the outlook for medical professionals could become bleak. “I kind of came to terms last night with the fact that we may see doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists die,” he told me. “And I am just trying to accept that bad things will happen so I’m not surprised.”

Emergency-room doctors, he noted, are among those most at risk.

Stephanie Anderson, a cousin to Yvonne and Pamela, holds that job at a hospital in Richmond, Virginia. She told me she worries about bringing the virus home to her husband and two children, ages 7 and 9. She keeps her distance from them until she has showered and put her clothes in the wash after she gets home from each shift. Then she disinfects her car. “I have a family that I’m coming home to. And I have to keep them safe,” she told me. “That’s been the concern among my colleagues: What are you going to do with your family? It’s on all of our minds. It’s certainly adding to our stress.”

Her emergency room has been seeing more and more patients who have symptoms associated with the coronavirus, she told me. She wears protective equipment but knows that the hospital could run out. Even if that happens, though, she’ll keep working: “For those of us in ER, we just know that’s what we signed up for. You work in mass-casualty events. You work in serious trauma. You just work.”

Anna Koo, Yvonne’s mother and the family’s eldest doctor at 68, expressed a similar mindset. In Britain, the government has asked for 65,000 doctors and nurses to come out of retirement to help manage the pandemic. In the United States, the Department of Veterans Affairs and New York City have made similar requests. People over the age of 65 are at increased risk from the coronavirus, but Anna told me she’d consider signing up. “If I’m needed and people think I can help, then definitely,” she said. “You know, we’re all in this. Everybody’s got to do their part.”

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It’s not lost on Koo and her family that medical professionals worldwide have been dying fighting the coronavirus. On Wednesday, a prominent doctor who’d been treating patients in northern Italy died alone in an intensive-care unit after contracting it. He was 57. Because of shortages similar to what U.S. doctors are predicting, he’d been forced to continue working after running out of gloves. Doctors and nurses in their 20s and 30s have succumbed to the virus in China. The most famous victim, Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who’d tried to issue early warnings about the pandemic, was 34.

But in my conversations with Yui and her family, I realized that the main dilemma they’re grappling with is not so much getting sick themselves but spreading the virus to their families, their patients, and the public. This might be the greatest fear of doctors across the country—that they’ll move from being part of the solution to part of the problem. “I think we all feel a really strong sense of duty to our patients and our work,” Jennifer Yui, Yvonne’s sister, a doctor who works with immunocompromised patients in Philadelphia, told me. “And that could lead to people working beyond when they should. It weighs heavily on people.”

Yui, for her part, told me she’d never let her fears over the virus stop her from doing her job. She expects to get her test result on Monday. If it’s negative, she’ll be back at work the same night. “I view myself as essential personnel. So it’s that sense of duty, I guess,” she said. “I have never thought of not going to work. We go in to take care of our patients through all sorts of natural disasters—and that is when we are needed the most.”

Mike Giglio is a staff writer at The Atlantic, covering intelligence and national security. He is the author of Shatter the Nations: ISIS and the War for the Caliphate.