so it's starting to hit the fan here at my wife's hospital. They set up a unit for covid last week, which is good. The unit has negative pressure isolation rooms with 1:1 nurses going through a pretty extensive decontamination process to get in and out of the room - like it takes five pairs of gloves, a paper gown, N95 mask, and who knows what else to get in and out of the rooms. They've been asked to re-use N95 masks and put them into new brown paper bags between rooms (and they can't seem to get new rough ridin' paper bags). Gloves and gowns are under lock and key and they expect to completely run out of supplies next week.
Part of the problem is testing: the hospital has an exclusive contract with a lab that has a FOUR DAY TURNAROUND on covid tests. Supposedly they can't go anywhere else. This mean that suspected covid patients are put in the negative pressure isolation until they're ruled out and it's assumed they have something more simple, like the flu or something. They had a patient in isolation for NINE DAYS before it was ruled out due to problems with communication between the lab and the hospital.
K-Dub was saying that Italy was worse because of their hospital designs, but ours will be no better or worse if nurses start contaminating themselves due to lack of PPE.
TL/DR: Nurses are gonna get sick due to lack of PPE due to long lead times on testing and it's gonna be a disaster unless something changes quickly
