https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-covid-19-healthcare-risks-equipment/

The prognosis is grim. “We're all anticipating that the situation is going to get worse,” says Elissa Schechter-Perkins, an emergency room physician at Boston Medical Center. As the coronavirus spreads across the United States, health care workers are reckoning with how to protect themselves while helping Covid-19 patients in increasingly harrowing circumstances. Access to personal protective equipment (PPE) is severely limited in many parts of the country, testing remains inadequate, and the likelihood of shortages of everything from masks to ventilators to hospital beds has left many workers stressed out, angry, and, in some cases, resigned to endure bedlam.

“Ideally, we would be wearing full PPE for all patients that we're seeing in the emergency department,” Schechter-Perkins says. Yet, in many cases, they are not. She has witnessed patients come in for unrelated reasons only to later show signs of infection, after they’d already been looked after by hospital staff. “Some of them have gone on to become confirmed cases of Covid-19.” Because the nurses and doctors attending to these patients didn’t immediately categorize them as coronavirus cases, she says colleagues wound up “completely unprotected.”