The doctor has never done this before. He does anesthetic, and has worked in emergency, in addition to teaching individual event crisis medicine, in addition to a lot of things. He is a good doctor.

Now he is trying to figure out how to keep himself and the hospital and its front-line workers safe, because when you intubate someone who has coronavirus — inserting a tube down their throat so they can breathe — the virus becomes airborne.

That means maximum personal protective equipment, and he has never intubated in maximum gear before. Nobody does that. How do you avoid contamination when you take it off? What if you move this way? He spends 18 to 19 hours on this problem so he can get to the next one. He has had to shave his 20-year beard so a mask can fit.

“We’re trying to reinvent the wheel,” says Jesse Guscott, the operating room physician lead at Collingwood General & Marine Hospital, in Collingwood, Ont. “We’re trying to invent a new wheel on the fly here.”

He works until he feels unhealthy, so sometimes he gets up and tries to ride a bike, go for a walk. It doesn’t take. There is no time. He has four children, including a three-week-old.

“Do I go home to my family, or do I go to a hotel room?” Guscott says. “Except, I could put people at risk in a hotel room, hotel workers. So, my garage? The office? I think a lot of people are not going to go home.”

This is life before wartime. Health-care workers have been killed by the coronavirus in China, in Italy, elsewhere, and more will come. These are the people who will be closest to the war.

The young doctor is in North Carolina, but he is from Thornhill. Every day when he is done with his work at a family practice he drives straight home and showers; his colleague, also in his early 30s, changes at the office, stuffs the work clothes in a bag, and drives home to shower immediately, stopping only to put the clothes in the washer. They have taken over any patients who come in with a fever or a cough, because the third doctor in the office is 67. Soon they will all work in hospital scrubs.

They have not seen a definite COVID-19 case, yet. But they know it’s coming. They talk about Italy, about tents outside the hospital, about deciding who gets oxygen. The doctor reads two to three hours a night, to know what is coming.

He lists off a few illnesses that could look like the coronavirus, which is a disease in disguise. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the flu, bacterial pneumonia, several ordinary viruses, asthma exacerbations, and strep throat in kids. It’s almost invisible, without a test. And there are no tests.

The other day he bought a propane tank at Lowe’s and had to use the PIN pad, and had to tell himself not to touch his face until he got home.

“You have to think, with every patient, do they have it?” he says. “I’m not an anxious person, but … whatever you do is going to put everyone at risk.

“This is our world war, I guess. This is the illness of our lifetime.”

The paramedic works in Peel Region. He would use his name if he was sure his bosses would have his back.

“The system is at capacity all the time,” he says. “The only day in my career that the emergency department was empty was during the gold-medal hockey match when Sidney (Crosby) scored.

He thinks a lot of the patients with chronic conditions in his community won’t survive COVID-19. He sends texts to friends telling them he worked through the SARS crisis in 2003, and they can call him with any questions, anything. He has two young daughters. He is asked how he deals with what is coming.

“Right now it’s tough,” the paramedic says. “We were prepping before the public was on board. People looked at my spouse and I like we were crazy. I’ve been drinking more, probably to self-medicate. Exercise helps.

“It’s a thrill to make a difference. It’s the only job where I can be invited into a home when a baby is born, or someone is dying. There are few jobs with those privileges.”

The doctor is awake at 5 a.m. Her son and daughter, eight and seven, are asleep, and she is reading Guscott’s tweets about coronavirus research, because they are both awake. Kylie Booth runs the emergency room in Collingwood, and everything is preparation. They have a plan for a tent outside the hospital. She cancelled her first vacation in two years last week.

“You can’t shut your mind off,” Booth says. “I was just raking the yard, just to put my mind at ease. It’s hard to sort it all out. I can see the consternation of the neighbours: they say, are you OK? And they don’t want to come near you. It’s almost like you’ve got the plague.

“I really do feel like I can count on my colleagues. I’m trying to think of an exception. There isn’t one.”

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The nurse is in Alberta, and doesn’t want her name used. She has three teenage children, and over the past two days she cooks big dinners for the family, and they go for family walks. She reads stories aloud to her kids, despite their age. Her husband tells people she’s been different, the last three days. Concerned.

The doctor is in Toronto. His name is Dr. Daniel Shogilev, and he is 34, educated at Duke and Stanford, and now home. The son of a doctor, Shogilev works in the ER at Mississauga Hospital. The ERs have slowed except for people who arrive worried about the coronavirus, and last week the doctors there put together a WhatsApp group. They sent thousands of messages back and forth, trying to improve the system. Areas take 45 minutes to disinfect after a suspected COVID-19 case; people were in the waiting room for four to eight hours, next to patients who were more likely to be more vulnerable to the disease.

They created a COVID zone: separate triage clerk, separate triage nurses. Waiting times went down to five minutes. The hospital has had to do one-swab tests instead of two, because they’re short on swabs — one large hospital in Ontario has been out for the last 48 hours. One swab is less reliable, but Shogilev, for one, gives patients a fear-of-god speech before they leave. He says to assume they have COVID, to self-isolate, and that in this crisis, a lot of people are going to die.

“When we get sick, which invariably we will because of how infectious this is … I’ve taken all precautions, but there’s a chance that I have it right now,” Shogilev says. “You can still spread it asymptomatically. But if a doctor or a nurse has it, we’re vectors, and we’re vectors to the particular population that will get hurt the most. Or if we pass it on to the nursing home patients we see. That’s an entire nursing home, with sick patients to begin with.

“The bilious spread … I’m not normally very aggressive, but two weeks ago there should have been martial law. Maybe that’s excessive, but what’s going to be excessive is when we see our loved ones die, and we can’t do anything. I’ve told my girlfriend, if you see anyone, I can’t see you. Because if you get sick, I get sick.”

“For me the biggest stress is (a) my parents, but (b) it’s clear what the trajectory of this is. (We’re all) trying to push, but I’m feeling a little hopeless. We know what needs to be done.”

Shogilev’s father is Howard, and he still works ER shifts in addition to his family practice. He is proud of his son. His son tells him, you can’t go to work, you’re 72, you work three shifts in the ER, you can’t go. You’re the high-risk population, I’ll pay your salary. Howard is currently in self-isolation after cutting short a Florida vacation.

“I have a shift scheduled at the hospital,” Howard says. “I still do emergency. I may go do it. I don’t think the family will approve, but it’s what I’ve been doing for 40 years.”

In 2003, he had direct contact with a SARS patient who died. He isn’t nervous about this yet, he says. Like everyone else, he thinks the storm is coming.

“Daniel graduated from high school, and I was on the lawn across the road from the party,” Howard says. “Because I wasn’t allowed off my property. But at that time, they told me I could go to work as long as I wore a mask. We didn’t know as much, then.

“You sound young. You ever see ‘Hill Street Blues’? Let’s be careful out there.”

This is life before wartime. There are a lot of people who are going to fight.