As of late last week, the pediatrics ward in the hospital where I work, in San Antonio, Texas, remains an island of calm, careful effort. Every morning, I bicker lightly with the charge nurse, who has been tasked with distributing masks for everyone on this floor, since some masks have disappeared from the cabinets where we usually keep them. The charge nurse reminds me not to waste masks; I tell her that I need them for my team; she tells me that I’d better not be bringing extra people into the room; I tell her I am taking measures to limit exposure, but I need some masks so we can see our patients; finally, she gives me masks, making sure to include a few with the annoying ties that add twenty seconds to the process of donning them. We respect each other, and this argument feels comfortable—familiar, even, as the week wears on, and our rooms continue to fill and empty, fill and empty, with the usual cycle of small children struggling to breathe through a typical respiratory virus: influenza, human metapneumovirus, adenovirus, rhinovirus, or the strains of coronavirus that I now think of as the “old-timey coronavirus”—our intimate friend and enemy, the common cold. Here in my pediatrics ward, as of this writing, we have not yet had a confirmed case of the novel coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19. We blow oxygen into our patients’ tiny mouths and noses, suck out their mucus, use medicines and tubes to make them continue breathing if we must. Generally, they recover. Some, usually the ones who were born prematurely, or who are very small or sick from other problems, move along to the I.C.U., then return to us after they have begun to recover.

“See, your kind are resilient,” I say to the boy in my uterus, whose movements I cannot yet feel. At night, I lie quietly in bed, trying to feel him; during the day, I move from infected child to infected child, counting the number of breaths each takes per minute. I suppose that another mother might see all these babies struggling for breath and learn not that they are resilient but that they are vulnerable. She would be right, in her way—but I am a pediatrician, in a well-equipped American hospital, and I know that I can make these babies breathe.

A paper was released this week from the journal Pediatrics analyzing 2,143 cases of the novel coronavirus in Chinese children aged eighteen and younger. Only one child, a fourteen-year-old, died. Just under six per cent of children became ill enough to require hospital care. Preliminary numbers coming from the U.S. show that around two per cent of COVID-infected kids here have required hospitalization.

While the lack of pediatric deaths is reassuring, this rate of hospitalization should still alarm us. It is much higher than that for typical respiratory infections—even influenza leads to hospitalization in far fewer than one per cent of cases.

The Centers for Disease Control has not yet documented any increased risk for pregnant people or fetuses exposed to the novel coronavirus. Very small studies have been reassuring: whereas we know that the influenza virus is more likely to kill pregnant women than others, as are the older, severe coronaviruses that cause SARS and MERS, this one has not been shown to do so. A small study from China showed a possible increased risk for preterm labor among pregnancies affected by COVID-19, but these data have not been replicated, and neither the C.D.C. nor I yet believe it.

Privately, like other pregnant physicians and nurses, I fret about the unknown. Other viruses, like cytomegalovirus, Zika, and rubella, can seriously harm babies in the womb—sometimes in ways that are not immediately evident at birth. So far, the new coronavirus does not seem to be passing through the placenta. There is no evidence of it harming fetuses, but we will not be able to rule that possibility out for a long time. Many babies have to be born to mothers who were infected during pregnancy for scientists to generate strong data and answer this question.

Practically speaking, however, isolating pediatricians from children with the SARS-COV2 infection may not be happening. Children are often asymptomatic or have very mild disease symptoms, such as a runny nose. They may be infected with multiple viruses at once, and so even a test identifying another viral cause of a child’s symptoms does not rule out coinfection with SARS-COV2. Where I practice, in San Antonio, testing is still limited to those with known exposure or severe symptoms; hospitalized children who have tested positive for another virus are not eligible for COVID testing. (This changes on a daily basis, and we are working hard to make more extensive testing available.)

My colleagues are shielding me from taking extra shifts in the hospital so far, and I know my boss would keep me home completely if she could (or needed to). But, so far, the best evidence suggests that I should take the same precautions as other health-care workers, with one addition: avoiding high-risk procedures like suctioning patients’ noses or putting in breathing tubes.

The best I can say for now is that things are uncertain. I go to work; I wash my hands. I know my son is turning because I saw him do it, once, on an ultrasound. But is that latest flutter him moving within me? I know the virus is out there, in my community, and likely even in my hospital. But is it in me? Is it already passing from the air I breathe into my bloodstream, and through my blood to him?

In medical school, I learned that physicians have a moral duty to continue our work in times of epidemic disease. We might send our families away, but we must stay where we are and tend to the ill and suffering. Respecting this duty, my Chinese and Italian colleagues have sacrificed their own health to care for others. In Italy, as of March 15th, 2,026 of the 22,512 cases of COVID-19 were among health-care workers. A recent article by Italian physicians in the Lancet suggested that twenty per cent of health-care workers in Lombardy had become infected.

In Albert Camus’s “The Plague,” the protagonist, Dr. Rieux, is separated from his wife throughout the book. She is hospitalized outside the city of Oran, for an unrelated illness, and after the city gates are closed Rieux is unable to see her for the duration of the plague. She dies there, and he learns of her death by telegram. Rieux survives.

In his “Hiroshima Diary,” the Japanese physician Michihiko Hachiya walks through his devastated city to his hospital in the hours after the 1945 atomic bombing. In a building where the roof has been blown off and supplies are limited, he acts “more as a comforter than a physician” for patients with burns and injuries. Hachiya also begins to document the slower deaths from radiation poisoning, and is among the first to comprehend the nature of the mysterious illness that ultimately kills him, too. But even after he knows that people are dying from the lingering effects of radiation exposure, and that radiation continues to surround him, he does not flee.