It is noon on Thursday, and from her home office in the Nashville suburbs, Dr. Sonal Gupta has already diagnosed four patients with presumptive cases of the coronavirus.

Like many doctors, she is now seeing patients through telemedicine, trying to fight the outbreak while remaining healthy enough to keep working. Her husband, a Vanderbilt anesthesiologist, will likely catch the virus eventually, Gupta said, so he now lives in a separate room of their home to minimize exposure.

They've both been advised by a Tennessee Department of Health webinar if they need to treat a coronavirus patient but don't have a protective gown or mask, one option is to wear a garbage bag or wrap a diaper around their face.

And, in recent days, they've spoken to colleagues in New York who described a city besieged by illness, and a dear friend who lived overseas has died from the virus.

All of this, Gupta said, is evidence of a daunting truth: This deadly virus is spreading fast, and Tennessee is falling behind.

“COVID-19 is at least two weeks ahead of us,” Gupta said in a video chat on Thursday. “If we are to have any chance of defeating this with the least loss of life possible, then we need a stay-at-home order done yesterday.”

Gupta, a primary care physician with Heritage Medical Associates, is part of a growing chorus of Tennessee doctors calling on Gov. Bill Lee to issue a statewide stay-at-home order to limit the spread of the coronavirus. More than 20 governors have issued such orders, according to CNN, but Lee has resisted calls to do the same and questioned whether stay-at-home mandates could even be enforced.

Although he has closed gyms and ordered restaurants and bars to end dine-in services, the governor has stressed that he prefers to recommend social distancing instead of mandating it. On Thursday, Lee announced a new public relations campaign that included celebrities urging residents to "do their part by staying apart."

Doctors insist this is not enough. Last week, medical organizations representing thousands of doctors sent a public letter urging Lee to issue a statewide order.

Dr. Aaron Milstone, a Franklin public health advocate who has spearheaded the effort to pressure the governor, said Thursday it was “weak leadership” to go without a statewide order just because it “might not be popular with some voters.”

Milstone pointed to epidemiology models that predict a statewide stay-at-home mandate could potentially save thousands of Tennessee lives during the coronavirus outbreak. No measures short of a statewide social distancing order would effectively slow the virus, Milstone said.

“In three months from now, no one will question the bold measure that we are taking to save lives,” he said. “But there will be plenty of questions if we settle now with half measures and PR campaigns. Gov. Lee must do more.”

Dermatologist Jennifer Martin, who started a petition calling for a stay-at-home order, said she believed the governor's inaction had left the public confused and unsure of how seriously to view the virus.

Martin is married to a pulmonary critical care doctor who works "on the front lines of this pandemic," but he also has a history of asthma, which puts him at additional risk from the virus. Like Gupta, her family has had to to separate to protect Martin and her three daughters from the virus.

“Until we can get a stay-at-home order statewide, people are still out mingling and mixing, and not everybody realizes that this is a silent, deadly killer that we are already two weeks behind,” Martin said.

Brett Kelman is the health care reporter for The Tennessean. He can be reached at 615-259-8287 or at brett.kelman@tennessean.com. Follow him on Twitter at @brettkelman.