Read: Why the coronavirus has been so successful

The COVID-19 pandemic is certainly not Ebola—the case-fatality rate is perhaps 1 percent, not 50 percent—but it raises an important practical and ethical question: How much risk do health-care workers have to take? Or, more bluntly: How many of us will die before we start to walk away from our jobs?

This is not a rhetorical question. In the SARS outbreak in Toronto, Canada, in 2003, 44 percent of all infections were in health-care providers. Two nurses and a physician died. In Arkansas, four of the first 12 COVID-19 patients were health-care workers. Last Sunday, the American College of Emergency Physicians reported that two ER doctors with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, are being treated in intensive-care units.

In China, about 3,000 health-care workers have been infected, and 22 have died providing care for COVID-19 patients. Consider also that “transmission to family members is widely reported.”

This is the dark secret of planning for a pandemic that can also kill health-care providers and their families. When we prepare for disasters, we plan using the mnemonic “Staff, stuff, space, and systems.” We can always make more space by wedging an extra bed in, or by repurposing another building. We can buy more stuff, supplies, and equipment. We can find new supply lines, reboot our computer systems. But we cannot conjure up doctors and nurses and health-care technicians. Physicians take at least 11 years to train after high school. Nurses at least four. Techs take years or months.

The United States needs its health-care workers to see it through this crisis. But there are no replacements on the shelf. They can’t be built, trained, or repurposed from other jobs. Unless the country does dramatically more to provide them with the equipment they need to do their job safely, to assure them they will be cared for if they fall ill, and to provide their family with a measure of security, it risks losing them. What happens when they need to be quarantined? When they start to die? Or don’t come to work?

It’s hard to plan after that happens.

As I settle into the rhythm of work one recent Monday evening, the controlled chaos of the emergency department seems almost normal. Patients come and go; the crowd in the waiting room swells to more than 30 people (and their family) before dinner. The halls are lined with patients on stretchers in various states of dress and discomfort. Twelve patients are waiting for beds, blocking those spaces for the people in the waiting room.

But some things have changed. Many of us are wearing surgical masks or are muffled in N95 respirators; others have on goggles. We have converted our urgent-care section into an infectious-disease screening area. The younger staff work there, shapelessly encased in personal protective equipment (PPE).