MADRID — As the coronavirus death toll rapidly climbs in Spain to make it a grim new hotspot of the global pandemic, healthcare workers like Alfonso Molina Moreno are struggling without proper gear and worried about their patients as well as themselves. Spain's health ministry says health workers currently make up about 14 percent of country's positive COVID-19 cases.

When the outbreak started hitting Madrid, Moreno figured the small palliative-care hospital he works in would be safer than others because no new patients were being admitted. But then an elderly patient with cervical cancer died, and a postmortem X-ray showed her lungs had advanced, bilateral pneumonia.

“It could have been coronavirus, right? She wasn’t tested,” he said. “We don’t know whether we, the staff, brought it here. We don’t know whether it was due to the patients’ visitors. We don’t know the source."

Staffers now take exhaustive precautions when working with patients who have tested positive—putting on protective equipment they dispose of in contaminated rooms and washing their hands on both sides of the door.

When we spoke, Morena hadn’t been tested. He may be able to soon, though: Spain has ordered 640,000 test kits from China and Korea in an effort to screen health workers and the most vulnerable, to help identify people who need to self-isolate.