Nurses on the front line

Around the world, health care providers are on the front line of the battle against the coronavirus.

Many are struggling not only to treat a disease with no known treatment, one to which no human has natural immunity. They are also facing an unprecedented global shortage of the masks, gowns and gloves known as personal protective equipment, due to international manufacturing shortfalls in the face of the pandemic. That equipment is essential to preventing health care workers from getting infected themselves and from passing the virus to patients and to their own family members.

Doctors and nurses and physician assistants and other health care workers sign up to work long hours, nights and weekends, away from their families. But never in our lifetime have they been asked to put their own health and their loved ones’ health at such risk.

At Coverage, we celebrate the work of nurses in our Heroes on the Front Line series, which amplifies the voices of clinicians in Massachusetts hospitals. We have been giving them a chance to speak to you, our readers, in their own words. We asked that they share their simplest, most urgent messages as they fight this new virus with no vaccine and no cure, a virus vulnerable only to our common human bravery, ingenuity and compassion.

Watch this video for some of the messages nurses have shared in recent weeks.

Read their full messages: