The day Paul’s friend died of the coronavirus, he still went to work. Paul (some health-care workers requested that we only use first names) is a senior resident at a hospital in South Florida, and all over his ward, he saw COVID-19 patients hooked up to ventilators, their inflamed lungs struggling to combat the severe respiratory failure to which his friend had just succumbed at age 35. “I’m usually the strong, silent type, and I found myself having to go find this little out-of-the-way storage room to hide and cry,” he told me. Each night when Paul goes to sleep, he finds himself racked with nightmares about the virus. “Now you have to fight against the mind frame of: Who else am I going to lose? Am I going to recognize someone in one of those beds? Or is it going to me?”

 

Read more: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/medical-workers-looming-mental-health-crisis.html