More than 1,200 health care workers have used a private online document to share their stories of fighting the coronavirus pandemic on the front lines.

In their accounts, they say the outbreak has turned American hospitals into “war zones.” They talk about being scared to go to work and anxious that they will become infected. They describe managers who seem to not care about their plight.

“But we show up and have to keep showing up,” one nurse wrote, “and we have to test ourselves.”

The document was created on March 19 by Sonja Schwartzbach, a nurse in New Jersey who is studying as a doctoral student. She said she had started compiling the accounts after she determined that hospital conditions were “far worse” than most people realized and that her fellow health care workers needed a place to share what they were seeing.

“There was such desperation,” she said in an interview. “And it wasn’t being adequately addressed in the news media.”