Weeks before the first New Yorker tested positive for the coronavirus, the M.T.A. was aware of the prospect that it might reach the city.

On Jan. 28, the president of Transport Workers Union Local 100, Tony Utano, met with several M.T.A. leaders, including the chief security officer, Patrick T. Warren, at the agency’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan to discuss the coronavirus outbreak, which had already forced a lockdown in Wuhan, China.

A doctor called in to discuss how the authority should respond to an outbreak: disinfectant for employees to keep their hands and shared work spaces clean, and masks, but only for those who fell sick — guidance that mirrored parts of the pandemic plan that the M.T.A. adopted in 2012.

By the group's next meeting, on March 5, the virus had reached New York.

Workers had already started requesting protective gear, like masks and gloves, but their appeals were denied because, at the time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had not recommended that healthy people wear face masks.

When some workers wore their own masks, they were told to remove them because they violated uniform policy, according to management responses to two formal complaints reviewed by The New York Times.

At the March 5 meeting, Mr. Utano and other labor leaders pressed the M.T.A. to alleviate the panic spreading among employees by providing masks to all workers and suspending the use of an attendance system that required them to touch a shared screen.

“We are supposed to have systems in place for this. We are supposed to have equipment for us to go out and serve the public even in a crisis,” said Ronald Spring, a bus operator. “But we didn’t see any of that happening like it should have.”