It is a question being asked in hospitals across the country: What is the duty to treat in a viral pandemic, particularly one in which health workers are getting infected and there is a dearth of personal protective equipment?

The question could be glibly dismissed. Medicine is a humanitarian profession, the argument would go. Health care workers have a duty to care for the sick. By freely entering into the profession, we have implicitly agreed to accept the risks.

Medical societies have generally been supportive of this idealistic viewpoint. The ethics manual of the American College of Physicians, for example, states that “the ethical imperative for physicians to provide care” overrides “the risk to the treating physician, even during epidemics.” The American Medical Association asserts that “individual physicians have an obligation to provide urgent medical care during disasters,” emphasizing that this duty persists “even in the face of greater than usual risks to physicians’ own safety, health, or life.”

However, this argument seems to minimize the quandary my colleagues are facing as they try to balance their obligations as professionals with their duties as husbands, wives, parents and children. The risk to personal health from the coronavirus is alarming enough, but the risk of infecting our families because of exposure on the job is for some unacceptable. With the rates of infection among health workers so high — nearly 14 percent of confirmed cases in Spain, for example — the risk of transmission to our loved ones is not insignificant. How do we balance our professional and personal obligations?