An Ebola patient was left in an open area of a Dallas emergency room for hours, and the nurses treating him worked for days without proper protective gear and faced constantly changing protocols, according to a statement released late Tuesday by National Nurses United (NNU), the largest U.S. nurses’ union.

Nurses were forced to use medical tape to secure openings in their flimsy garments, worried that their necks and heads were exposed as they cared for a patient with diarrhea and projectile vomiting, said Deborah Burger of the NNU.

“There was no advance preparedness on what to do with the patient. There was no protocol. There was no system,” she said.

Even today, Burger said, some staffers at the Dallas hospital do not have proper equipment to handle patients with the disease.

“Hospital managers have assured nurses that proper equipment has been ordered, but it has not arrived yet,” she said.

Burger convened a conference call with reporters to relay what she said were concerns of nurses at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, where Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S., died last week.

He died Oct. 8, and the hospital said Sunday that one of his nurses has tested positive for Ebola. She is hospitalized and was listed Tuesday in good condition. On Wednesday, Texas health officials announced that a preliminary test indicated a second, unidentified health care worker at the hospital had also been infected.

Dr. Daniel Varga, chief clinical officer of Texas Health Resources, which owns the hospital, denied the nurses’ allegations on Wednesday and said that the hospital’s quick isolation of the second health care worker proved its response to the disease is working.

“A lot is being said about what may or may not have happened to expose our colleagues to this disease,” but there is no “systemic” problem that led to the workers’ infections, Varga said.

“No one wants to get this right more than our hospital,” he added, saying that he would not comment on the allegations the union made but that health care workers do have access to proper protective gear.