Dara Kass is a doctor but she is also a public speaker, a political activist, and a Park Slope mother of three. Over the course of the past few weeks, however, she has reoriented her life so that she can put the health of the people of New York City first. Her children have been sent to live with her parents. She has divided up her house to minimize contact with her husband.

Tell me about your regular work life.

I work at Columbia University’s hospital, which is part of New-York Presbyterian. Normally I work part-time as an attending in the ER, so I do very few shifts and a lot of telemedicine; this means I’m on the phone with patients all day. We have a very good direct-to-consumer virtual urgent care program. The minute this outbreak started, all the telemedicine clinics in the city saw the number of patients they were seeing explode. I have worked every day for the past 12 days, whether through telemedicine or at the hospital.

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What are you seeing on the ground in the ER right now?

It’s changing every day. A point I want to emphasize, though, is that the federal government set us up for failure. They should have paid attention to what the forecasters were saying months ago, but they ignored the warning signs and stuck their heads in the sand. The underreporting and under-testing has made us fundamentally unable to combat this effectively. The New York [state] government has been remarkable; [Governor Andrew] Cuomo has been doing a great job. But the lack of federal oversight means that there will be pockets of success and pockets of failure. It makes it that much harder for us to combat this on a global level. On the ground, I’m seeing health care professionals do their best to catch up. New York has the highest number of infections of all the states in America, and we’re going to see that number increase exponentially.

The testing criteria is changing day to day, but we are not able to test enough people—just a fraction of the patients we see are getting tested. People who live with their 85-year-old grandmother and are displaying symptoms are not getting tested. People who have symptoms [and] need a positive test in order to keep getting paid by their employers while they’re not working are not getting tested. Right now, we are saving the tests for people who are in critical condition.

We’re all wearing as much PPE [personal protective equipment] as possible, including goggles that were given to us by the hospital. But we don’t know how long the supplies are going to last.

You’ve tweeted about the extensive guidelines that Alibaba founder Jack Ma put out to help combat the spread of COVID-19. What did you learn from reading those guidelines?

We don’t have the capacity to do a fraction of the things they are suggesting. Across the country, we’re not testing health care workers regularly and we’re not “cohorting” them like they did in China. The report recommends keeping health care workers away from their families—intrafamily transmission is 80%. When you live in the same house as a health care worker, you can be considered exposed. I moved my kids out of the city before I saw a single patient because my son had a liver transplant. They’re now living with my parents. In China they even had “halfway house” programs to reintegrate health care workers back into their families. They would move into these facilities for 14 days to make sure they were not contagious. They would test them multiple times.

How are you and your friends who are medical workers dealing with exposure within your families?

Most of my friends who are living with their families have a decontamination protocol—a set of rules for how you enter the house: You get undressed at your door, take a shower. All weekend I showered. My husband and I have divided up the house into rooms that are mine and rooms that are his. We’re like an unmarried Orthodox Jewish couple. There’s one chair in my bedroom that he’s allowed to sit on when I’m in the bed because its six feet away from the bed. He’s so lonely! He’s in this intermediary state; his kids are gone, but he can’t go to them.

I can hear you coughing, and you told me that you just tested positive. How do you feel?

On Monday I tried to do a very gentle stretching video and I could barely do it because it was so painful. The cough has gotten progressively worse. It catches up with you when you’re speaking for too long. It’s hard to take a deep breath, and I’m winded two minutes after I’ve gone up a flight of stairs. But I feel well enough to do telemedicine so at least I’m being useful.

What do you think of some recent proposals that would affect treatment in New York? Like the hospital ship that is meant to dock in the New York Harbor?

The hospital ship is not a quick fix. They take a really long time to move and it’s unclear what it would do. In theory, it’s a 1,000-person floating hospital, but it’s unclear who would go there or who would run it. At this point, it’s just unclear what will matter.

What gives you hope or comfort at the moment?

There’s no comfort yet. The hope comes from the fact that everyone is listening now. People are scared but they want to know what the right thing to do is, and they want to do it. CNN and MSNBC—they are putting doctors and scientists on their shows and letting them speak.

And the entire health care workforce is inspiring. When the Italian doctors who were on the ground took to social media, we listened to them, and we started mobilizing, even when the administration was not. We know full well that we’re going to be standing in the path of this storm, but not for one second have we second-guessed that it’s the right place to be. We’ve moved our families; we’ve changed our schedules to be available. Whether this is going to be a two-week ordeal or a two-month one or a six-month one, we’ve changed our lives to make this the focus. Med students have been sending out Google Docs to organize babysitting for doctors. Doctors have been trying to get PPE from all over the world. We are trying really hard to take care of everyone as best we can with what resources there are. It may not be enough, but we are trying.

This interview has been edited and condensed.