Early in the coronavirus crisis, before New York shut down and the schools closed, when people still shared opinions about Marie Kondo and the timing of the Iowa caucuses, Elmhurst Hospital, in Queens, began rearranging its emergency room. The section for less acutely ill patients became a screening room for patients with symptoms of COVID-19. Within days, a new wall had been built. The critical-care area was doubled, then tripled. A triage tent soon went up outside. And the family room—where doctors and families can have difficult conversations in relative privacy—was turned into a place for the distribution of personal protective equipment, a transition from a “cold zone” to a “hot zone.” “You walk into your shift and are handed a bag with your P.P.E. for the day, like it’s your lunch box when you show up to school,” Hashem Zikry, an E.R. doctor, told me, adding, “It’s a little bit surreal. We all have perspective for a moment on how truly insane what’s going on is. That our life is picking up this P.P.E. and changing into it, and that everyone out there is so sick.”
At the beginning of a recent shift at Elmhurst, Zikry took over the care of a forty-five-year-old man who had a wife and four children. Although the man was on high levels of oxygen, he was short of breath. He had written out several paragraphs in Spanish specifying that he did not want to be intubated or resuscitated. “Normally, I don’t push back on that too much, because I think people don’t understand the futility of those efforts in most cases,” Zikry said. “I pushed back on him, though. Because he was only forty-five.” The man reiterated his wishes. “When he came in, he was well enough to speak in full sentences,” Zikry said. “Two hours later, when he was at the point where we would have intubated him, I asked him again.” Too breathless to speak, the patient shook his head; he was resolute. Zikry called the man’s wife, who said that she trusted her husband to decide. “It was a horrendous shift,” Zikry said. “So many people were dying.” The man was visibly in agony, as is every patient struggling for air. Zikry and other doctors tried to help him find positions that might let more air into his lungs. The man rolled and bucked; eventually, he was still. By the end of the shift, he was dead. Zikry called the wife again. She didn’t shout; she thanked him and the other doctors and nurses. “It was very hard to hear someone thank you for standing there and watching her husband die,” Zikry said. “I felt very helpless.”
Zikry has been working as a doctor for nine months. He is twenty-nine years old, an intern in the emergency-medicine residency program at Mount Sinai Hospital. As part of his training, he rotates through different hospitals and specialties. In late February, he began a six-week rotation in the E.R. at Elmhurst Hospital, a place he loves and describes as the soul of medicine. The neighborhood around the hospital is one of the most diverse on the planet. Nearby blocks are crowded with Thai noodle shops, Colombian bakeries, and groceries that sell lotus and taro root. The neighborhood, which has a large working-class immigrant population, was hit earlier and harder by the pandemic than most of the rest of the city. “It’s become very clear to me what a socioeconomic disease this is,” Zikry told me. “People hear that term ‘essential workers.’ Short-order cooks, doormen, cleaners, deli workers—that is the patient population here. Other people were at home, but my patients were still working. A few weeks ago, when they were told to socially isolate, they still had to go back to an apartment with ten other people. Now they are in our cardiac room dying.” Zikry, whom I have spoken to regularly in the past month, has extraordinary resilience and good humor; on this day, he sounded despondent. “After my shift, I went for a run in Central Park, and I see these two women out in, like, full hazmat suits, basically, and gloves, screaming at people to keep six feet away while they’re power walking. And I’m thinking, You know what, you’re not the ones who are at risk.”
Before Zikry went to medical school, he had been in an E.R. only once. When he was thirteen, he shut his front door on his left middle finger. There was so much blood that his mother almost fainted, and Zikry remembers going to the E.R. with his younger brother. An orthopedic surgeon said that there was nothing to be done—he would lose the finger. By then, his mom had arrived, “like a mother on a mission,” and she said, “My son is a pianist, don’t tell me there’s nothing to be done!” A plastic surgeon was brought in—Jess Ting, who had studied music at Juilliard. Zikry had never played piano in his life. He told Ting that his parents were the worst people in the world, and liars. (“I was very . . . hormonal.”) Zikry recalled, “Then Ting said to me—and he became my mentor, he’s the one who kept encouraging me to go to medical school over the years—‘Well, I’m here now, let’s see if I can help.’ ”
Zikry went to Hamilton College, where he studied English and ran cross-country, before going to Mount Sinai’s Icahn Medical School. He loves Jane Austen. He still reads before bed, and trains for and runs marathons—his favorite is Grandma’s Marathon, in Minnesota. Through the majority of the pandemic, Zikry worked an average of six days a week at Elmhurst. His shifts often lasted thirteen hours, an exhausting schedule that is typical for a first-year physician.
Even after New York’s schools were closed, on March 16th, many hospitals in the city were at the eerie stage of preparing and waiting for a surge in COVID patients. “I would say our E.R. looks, well, more orderly than usual,” Jolion McGreevy, who directs Mount Sinai Hospital’s E.R., told me, on March 18th. Elaine Rabin, the head of the hospital’s emergency-medicine residency program, recalled being an intern during 9/11, and said, “This is different from that. It very much feels like a tsunami is about to hit us.” But, for the time being, the patient volume at Sinai was down. The non-corona cases—the broken bones, the belly pains, even the chest pains—were not turning up in their usual numbers. (Telemedicine had off-loaded some of those patients, but people were also afraid of the hospital, as evidenced later in the dramatic increase of deaths at home.) Elmhurst Hospital, however, was already four people deep into its sick-call list for staffing. It had many COVID patients, but they were accompanied by the usual load of “normal” cases. “The drunk falls, the chest pains—those numbers have been inelastic here,” Zikry told me, in late March.
The P.P.E. bags that Elmhurst doctors received at the start of their shifts contained a papery yellow gown, blue gloves, a face shield, and an N95 mask. The mask had to suffice for a whole day, although as recently as February the C.D.C. recommended putting on a new one for each patient. An N95 mask fits the face more tightly than a regular surgical mask, and has a metal strip on top to hold it in place. “The bridge of my nose is bleeding from wearing it all day,” Zikry told me. “I tried to MacGyver it with a Band-Aid, but it’s not working.” The P.P.E. that E.R. doctors in New York have been wearing more closely resembles a poor man’s welding gear than the astronaut-like outfits seen in photos of medical workers in South Korea.
When Zikry came on shift on the evening of March 21st, one of the COVID patients signed out to his team seemed not as sick as some of the others he’d seen. “He walked by the desk during sign-out,” Zikry told me. “He walked by again fifteen minutes later. Asked us where the bathroom was. He was walking—that’s a great sign. Talking—that’s a great sign. These are very reassuring things to a physician. I wrote down, ‘Ambulatory, Conversant.’ ” A short time later, a hospital police officer approached Zikry to say that a man had collapsed in the bathroom. When Zikry reached him, the man had no pulse. He began chest compressions. “Nothing like this had ever happened to me,” Zikry said. “I had seen him walking minutes before.” The man was taken on a stretcher to the critical-care area, where resuscitation equipment was on hand. Despite the efforts of Zikry and others, the patient died about fifteen minutes later. Zikry recalled turning back toward the rest of the E.R. He said, “We look back on this sea of, like, three hundred people that expected us to treat them immediately, to figure out what was wrong with them.” This was around 3:15 a.m.
Zikry had been in the middle of a presentation—describing to a team of providers how a different patient was doing, so that they could make a plan for care. “I had to pick up in the middle of that conversation as if it had been about a basketball game the night before,” he said.
That day, a headline in the Washington Post read “In hard-hit areas, testing restricted to health care workers, hospital patients.” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, “When you go in and get tested, you are consuming personal protective equipment, masks and gowns—those are high priority for the health-care workers.”
But Zikry’s patients—and patients across the country—wanted to be tested. “I got yelled at a lot,” Zikry said. “I understand the anger.” The P.P.E. makes communication more difficult—all that a patient sees is eyes behind a plastic shield. “It’s that much more distance between patient and provider.” At Elmhurst, which offers translation in dozens of languages, conversations often occur through an interpreter. “The most difficult thing has been describing to patients what is going on,” Zikry said. “We ourselves are so confused and scared, and every day when we come on shift it seems like there’s a different protocol”—the guidance comes from the state Department of Health—“for who are we testing, who are we admitting.”
Repeatedly, Zikry had to explain to patients that they probably did have the coronavirus, but that there wasn’t much the hospital could do for them—they needed to go home and take Tylenol, and come back if they were in respiratory distress. “These patients are well informed,” he said. “They say we’re not testing enough and that’s why it’s spreading so much, and there I am trying to explain, maybe with a video interpreter in Mandarin, the intricacies of why we are past the point of testing, that we don’t have those resources.”
Some patients, frustrated and frightened, told Zikry that this would never happen in another country, and that he didn’t care about them. “That is so hard,” he said. “I often think about what mistakes I may have made, what I could do better. But the one mistake I know I never make is the mistake of not caring.” These encounters can exacerbate a sense of loneliness, one that paradoxically persists alongside a heightened camaraderie among E.R. doctors—all in it together, day after day. “Even co-residents—people with the exact same lived experience—we don’t get to talk to each other much,” Zikry said. “We’re working so hard. And we’re also on quarantine.” The residents used to meet up at a bar or a coffee shop. “That has completely dissipated. And it feels strange. Because they are the only people who know what my days are like.”
After his shifts, Zikry took off his P.P.E., showered at the hospital, then changed his clothes completely before turning off his phone and running some six miles to the Upper East Side, where he shares an apartment with his younger brother, Bassel. Bassel has kept their refrigerator stocked. That week, Zikry’s bedtime reading was “Duel in the Sun,” an account of the 1982 Boston Marathon, in which Alberto Salazar and Dick Beardsley had one last great race, before problems—illness, addiction—pulled them down. Zikry says that his runs home help him reach a reconciliation with the day, “which is not a peace, it’s different from peace.” Reading helps his mind change tracks. “I’m a big dreamer,” Zikry said. “And I love sleep.” Most nights, he gets a break from the hospital in his dreams.
Every day in an E.R. is potentially traumatic. Dan Egan, an E.R. physician at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia Hospital, has been a doctor for more than fifteen years. “We work with disasters, we see horrible things all the time,” he told me. “We see unexpected deaths as part of our regular job.” Still, he said, colleagues were now calling him crying in fear—something that had never happened before. “I think it’s that it’s unknown. I remember the time of Ebola. Of course we were scared—and that was a more deadly disease—but it didn’t feel like it does now.”
Egan and I went to medical school together. I was there for the classic wrong reason: to fulfill parental expectations. (I had not even been able to handle the fertilized-egg dissection, back in fifth grade.) Egan was the magnificent opposite. “Honestly, I loved all of medical school,” he said lightly, as if it were a goofy attribute. He has a beautiful voice and sings in choirs, but he has a disarming way of speaking like a teen-ager when it suits the situation. If our medical-school class had had a homecoming king, it would have been him. He was kind to everyone, and he never complained—a popular medical-student pastime. He has loved the E.R. since he was a kid, when his mother was an E.R. nurse. When we were in school together, I thought—and still think—that if I were sick and scared I would want Dan to be my doctor. I told him that. He laughed. “I don’t want this to sound strange, but one of the things I treasure is being able to communicate bad news to patients in a compassionate and human way,” he said. Sometimes a patient comes in with a headache, which turns out to be something awful. Patients come in with a rash, and leave with the news that they have cancer. “My father died of metastatic esophageal cancer, and I still remember that conversation with the oncologist,” Egan said. “It was so not compassionate. So not humanistic. I couldn’t believe it was happening in that way. I know my patients will remember these conversations, and it’s important to me that the human piece be there.”
Egan was exposed to COVID-19 on March 12th, and went into quarantine. He did telemedicine while out, but, he said, he felt “almost guilty that I couldn’t be there to step up.” When the quarantine protocol for health-care providers with mild symptoms was reduced, from fourteen days to seven, he returned early. He felt well, and wanted to work. I heard again and again that, despite doctors’ stress and fear, they were glad to have something to offer. When I asked Zikry why he chose to specialize in emergency medicine, he replied, “For times like this.” Yvette Calderon, an E.R. doctor at Mount Sinai, who grew up in the Chelsea projects, a few miles south of the hospital, said, “This is the door to the hospital. The E.R. is what faces the community. I grew up seeing that there was a need, and I wanted to be in the part of the hospital that serves literally everyone.”
On March 24th, New York had been shut down for four days. Governor Andrew Cuomo said, “We haven’t flattened the curve, and the curve is actually increasing.” Cuomo cited estimates that New York State might need as many as a hundred and forty thousand hospital beds. The city had some twenty-three thousand beds in use, and hospitals were converting surgical and pediatric units into space for COVID patients. Work was beginning on a four-thousand-bed facility at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center to decant non-COVID patients from hospitals—but even at Elmhurst there were now very few of these.
“I’m truly exhausted,” Zikry told me that day, at the end of another overnight shift. “I’m starting to see patients I’ve already seen, now in worse condition. A patient who four days ago had an oxygen saturation of a hundred per cent and an O.K. chest X-ray, then two days later their saturation is low nineties and it’s not a great chest X-ray—well, they come in now with a saturation in the high eighties and with horrendous chest X-rays, and we need to admit them to the hospital.” Zikry knows that medical language can obscure as well as explain: “The term used for what you see on the X-rays is ‘ground-glass opacities.’ I have no idea what actual ground glass looks like. I can tell you that on the X-ray it looks like a snowed-out background, or like when I go out in the rain—I wear glasses—and I can’t really see, because of the water on my glasses. There are these patchy opacities. That’s what the chest X-rays look like.”
Each E.R. has a board that notes who has been seen and who remains to be seen, and clearing the board constitutes part of E.R. doctors’ collective sense of well-being. “We never caught up on the board,” Zikry told me, after a shift. “All of us were working so hard, but we were about forty people behind all night.” As the crisis progressed, it was taking longer and longer for patients to be admitted to a ward in the hospital—and more critically ill patients were remaining in the E.R. to receive care. There were stretchers in hallways and the common spaces, wherever space could be found.
“What strikes me is the deterioration of what is normal,” Zikry said. Walking by some stretchers, he noticed two patients who were not in visible distress but who had oxygen saturations in the seventies. They needed to go into the critical-care area immediately. Soon after, “I hear this guy calling me by name, he’s smiling and waving,” Zikry said. “And it’s this man—I’ve seen him three times this week. I have friends who would be so jealous of how much more time I have spent hanging out with this guy than with them. So I was feeling amused and also maybe dismissive—that I have already counselled this guy so many times to go home and watch his symptoms.”
The man, to the eye, seemed unchanged. “I go ahead and order his chest X-ray again, not expecting to see a change—and it was atrocious.” The man was on the verge of crashing—of not being able to breathe properly without medical assistance. “It was so scary. And he had looked so well.” Many doctors had described to me the grave contrast, in many COVID-19 cases, between a patient who can sit comfortably in a chair and a chest X-ray that shows pneumonia in both lungs. Soon, those patients can abruptly crash. “You see the patient using the full energy of the body to breathe,” Zikry said. “Neck muscles are distending. You see the muscles around the ribs.”
At around 3:45 a.m., Zikry received a text from his mother: “I’m in tears thinking of you.” She was worried that he wouldn’t take care of himself. She said that he was the most important. The text made him laugh a little. Zikry is not much of a crier. He recalled crying only once in the past ten years, while studying for the Step One exam, a comprehensive all-day test at the end of the second year of medical school. “I just hated it so much, I wanted to quit medical school. I had composed the e-mail,” Zikry said. “I called my mom and was saying I wanted to quit, and she was in a car with my brother, and I think he had been yelling at her, too.” His mother dropped the phone accidentally. He called back, telling her that she didn’t care about him, and that he was going to quit then and there. “She said—and I give her so much credit—she said, ‘Look, O.K., if you want to quit, you can quit tomorrow morning.’ ” He didn’t quit. His third year of training changed his perspective: he kept meeting physicians about whom he thought, That’s the kind of adult I’d like to be.
Zikry took an Uber home from his shift that day, instead of running. That was unusual for him, but he was unusually tired. His residency program was paying for rides for residents, as a gesture of support. It was around 7:45 a.m., the beginning of a kind of day off. Interns call this a DOMA—day off, my ass. He would get home around eight-thirty, have breakfast with his brother, try to rest, and then be back at work by 7 a.m. the next day.
Throughout the crisis, doctors have made clear their dismay at the lack of proper supplies—both for their own protection and for the health of their patients. “The systemic frustrations are the most exhausting,” Zikry told me. “Today, we ran out of oxygen masks for the patients to use. So much work goes into trying to locate and obtain more. We had a shortage of oxygen tanks, so we connected more than one patient to larger tanks—stuff we normally wouldn’t do. Will we run out of masks entirely? People can give you answers, but they are not witnessing what is happening in front of you. People can tell you it will be O.K., and it is solvable, but this has never happened before.”
Physicians in other cities watched New York for a sense of what was headed their way. David DiBardino, a pulmonologist at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, described how the process of entering his hospital had changed for employees. “We’re funnelled through an entrance that hasn’t been open for years,” he said. “It has this black metal gate that looks so gothic. It’s like a near-future dystopian scene, like something you would watch on Netflix. Some people are trying to distance in line, but also it’s a line, you can’t be that far away—so distance, but not wanting to get cut.” On March 26th, the third day of the new entrance policy, the line was three blocks long. “Three city blocks of people in scrubs panicking. This anesthesiologist who is older saw the line and started screaming—he was anxious about how close people were standing in the line.”
As at Elmhurst, doctors receive only one set of P.P.E. for the day. “The P.P.E. has actually been put under lock and key,” DiBardino said, and laughed. “I have to deal with these things with humor, because it’s all so weird and scary.” In subsequent days, the line to enter the hospital grew short, then long again; instructions for hand hygiene, temperature taking, and mask distribution kept shifting. “What has really been startling is this gap between the protocols—between how we used to throw the mask away after every procedure and the really difficult practical challenge of, how do you avoid contaminating yourself with the new conservation protocol,” he said. “It’s hilarious how tedious it is. You touch the back of your neck, and then you’re, like, Is the back of my neck contaminated now?”
DiBardino, who with his wife has three children—fifteen-month-old twins and a three-year-old—does not typically work in the I.C.U. “As interventional pulmonologists, we are board certified in critical-care medicine, but it’s not something we do on a daily basis.”On April 6th, that changed. “It’s really, personally, scary,” he said. “There’s a really good chance that I will contract COVID-19—and I think, you know, you and I should be fine if we catch it, but whether to bring that home to my family? Should I just stay at work and not come home?”
DiBardino was asked to lead a team at a neurology ward that was transformed into an I.C.U. for COVID care—a seven-day tour of duty. An anesthesiologist was assigned to head one half of the ward, and DiBardino the other. “The rooms have this pretty loud hum to them,” he said, because negative pressure is used to keep the COVID air from escaping. The doors to the patients’ rooms are kept shut, and typically only one medical worker goes in at a time, while the rest watch through the glass. “It’s like a fishbowl,” DiBardino said. He described his first day of training there: “So the nurse goes into the room with a wipeboard. She’ll write, ‘B.P. is super low. Max norepi?’ Or she’ll write, ‘I need a new I.V. bag,’ and so someone runs to get it.” Coming in and out of the room is slowed by the donning and doffing of gloves, a gown, the N95 mask, and a face shield.
Emergencies occur all the time in an I.C.U. “An alarm seems to go off every five minutes, but then only one person goes into the room for the response—it’s so weird,” DiBardino said. “It’s almost like we’re running as fast as we can, but with one foot nailed to the ground.” Since the doors of the rooms are glass, doctors standing outside sometimes direct the provider inside by writing backward on the glass doors, so that the person inside can read it. “I know this is stupid,” DiBardino said, “but one of the first thoughts I had was: I can’t write backward!”
By early April, funeral homes in New York were overwhelmed, and the city had deployed forty-five mobile morgues. The Javits Center switched from serving only non-covid patients to serving exclusively covid patients. More than six million Americans filed for unemployment in one week. A midlife-crisis film called “Phoenix, Oregon” topped the box-office, making $2,903 from showings on twenty-seven screens. Half the planet was under lockdown orders. People mixed quarantinis, didn’t quite educate their children. Guidance on masks was still changing. My mom wrote to my brother and me about ordering tonic water, because she had read that it had quinine, which was getting talked about as a remedy.
At Elmhurst, as at many publicly funded hospitals in poor communities throughout the country, the situation was deteriorating. In the best of times, these hospitals are underfunded and overwhelmed. Yaagnik Kosuri, a general-surgery intern at Mount Sinai Hospital, who has been working at Elmhurst during the pandemic, described much of his work as a “hundred-per-cent Sisyphean task. That is the situation at baseline. It just wasn’t set up for success in the setting of something so catastrophic.”
So many patients were in the E.R. that a resident was assigned to walk around checking their oxygen levels, to make sure that they weren’t crashing. This job had never existed before. “I thought the volume could not be worse,” Zikry said. “I thought we had reached an asymptote. We have superseded that. The other day, we had thirty-one intubated patients in our E.R., which is twenty-eight to thirty-one more than normal.” Now when he left the hospital each day a dozen reporters were there to ask questions, as if the doctors were some dark version of Broadway actors exiting the stage door. “I just show up to work,” Zikry said. “I am very scared to do it. I am scared something is going to happen. On my way over, I say to myself, I’m going to show up. If I just keep showing up, something good will come of it compounded over time.”
It had been Bassel’s birthday, so Zikry decided to try to cook spicy fish tacos, one of his brother’s favorite meals. At Citarella, Zikry had walked past the mustard he wanted, then taken a few steps backward to get it, and in the process bumped into someone, who started shouting at him: How could he be walking backward at a time like this? “I had to let that one go,” Zikry said.
In the E.R., the work had become “sadly algorithmic.” Typically, the glory of working in an E.R. is that you never know who will come in the door, what kinds of problems they will have. “We now presume they all have COVID,” Zikry said. “You don’t have to be Dr. House to figure it out.” He said that he tries to tell a patient early in the conversation, “ ‘I think you have coronavirus and you need to be admitted to the hospital.’ I think it’s a shocking conversation for them. Especially if they’ve been waiting for eight hours and I’ve been seeing them for thirty seconds.”
In normal times, a nurse or a technician draws blood for lab tests, a task that doctors tend to be not that good at, but now, because of staff shortages, it’s part of the job. Zikry described drawing labs from a patient, then taking the patient to get a chest X-ray. Hospital stretchers drive worse than grocery carts. “I hit his bed against a corner,” Zikry said. “And this guy, who hadn’t spoken any English up to that point, turned and said, ‘Is this your first fucking day?’ ” Zikry has a youthful face. “I have the same questions he does. I don’t know how I ended up in this situation.”
To contain the spread of the virus, family members are not allowed in the E.R. or on I.C.U. floors. People are in distress alone. E.R.s, which are often in basements, sometimes don’t have good cell-phone reception, and worried families have no choice but to call doctors. When I spoke with Dan Egan at the end of March, he was coming off two consecutive night shifts. Over the weeks, more staff arrived—Egan worked with a pediatrician and with an orthopedic physician assistant—but the work remained overwhelming. Egan said, “I have never put more patients on a ventilator in one shift in my life, and of course I was thinking, If this is how it is now, and with what the models are predicting for a week or two from now—it makes me really scared.”
He described the barring of visitors as a secondary trauma. “Families are calling me all night for updates,” he said. As an E.R. doctor in New York, he’s accustomed to being yelled at. The current situation is not like that: “Instead, they are, like, Doctor, I know how busy you are, I just want an update on how he’s doing.” One young patient struck him as the sickest person he had seen that night. “And I’m trying to relay that over the phone to the family, who thinks he’s at the hospital with, like, ‘a little coronavirus.’ ” The patient was on a ventilator. “I wanted to be honest about how sick he was, but I didn’t want to take away hope. They’re asking me, ‘Will I be able to talk to him tomorrow?’ And, because they’re not here, it’s so much more difficult to explain what it means to be on a ventilator—that a machine is breathing for him.” Egan wants to be empathetic, but he’s taking care of many patients at once. “Multiple times last night, I had to say, ‘I am so sorry, but I have to get off the phone, because someone really sick is coming in right now.’ ”
The medicine is the medicine, Egan explained. Everyone is on oxygen, and everyone is there for the same thing. “But people are dying, and the family is not there.” That night, he had an older patient who was critically ill, on a ventilator. He was not expected to live much longer. Egan had had multiple phone conversations with the man’s daughter about how sick he was, and what the family’s goals of care were—they wanted him to be free of pain. The daughter got off the phone to contact her siblings. “Then she called me back and asked me if I could do her a favor. I say, ‘Yes, of course.’ She says to me, ‘Would you go in and put the phone to his ear so we can all say goodbye?’ ”
He put on his gown and gloves and full P.P.E., and went into the patient’s room. “I had the phone on speaker, because I couldn’t really hold it to his ear with all of the equipment. I felt like I was intruding, but that’s what it was.” The words were mostly Spanish. Six or seven family members, all telling the man how much they loved him. “I thought, My God, this is real. This is what everyone is doing now.” ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- How the coronavirus behaves inside of a patient.
- Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy?
- The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people.
- The success of Hong Kong and Singapore in stemming the spread holds lessons for how to contain it in the United States.
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
- With each new virus, we have scrambled for a new treatment. Can we prepare antivirals to combat the next global crisis?
- How pandemics have propelled public-health innovations, prefigured revolutions, and redrawn maps.
- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under coronavirus quarantine.
