“This is a cautionary tale for our time. Things are already tough in Illinois hospitals, including mine. There’s no vaccine or readily available anti-viral to help the stem the tide. All we have to slow the spread is distance — social distance," she said. "If we let every single patient with this infection infect three more people, and then each of them infect two or three more people, there won’t be a hospital bed when my mother can’t breathe very well, or when yours is coughing too much.”