And coming home scares me even more. Two New York ER doctors log their days, one month into the city’s coronavirus crisis.

Having trained in an intense ER residency, I’m used to seeing all sorts of critical situations. I’ve delivered babies in the ER parking lot; I’ve seen horrific trauma in which the entire inside of human anatomy was visible; I regularly deal with strokes, sepsis, heart attacks, broken bones, head bleeds, failing organ transplants, etc.

I’m used to handling acutely psychotic patients, severely demented patients, drunks, drug addicts; I have often been yelled at, cursed at, spit at, even hit and kicked.

Yet nothing has compared to what we are seeing now with COVID. For the first time in my life, going to work scares me, and coming home from work scares me even more—because of the concern that I might bring the infection home to my boyfriend. More and more colleagues (nurses, PAs, attending physicians, residents) are falling sick. Two young residents in NYC reportedly died from the coronavirus.

The health care system in the United States has been faulty for a long time. Front-line staff in hospitals have been asking for updated equipment for years. Instead, often our profit-driven system focused on improving Press Ganey (customer satisfaction) scores rather than upgrading supplies that would actually enable better health care.

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