A sports medicine office morphs into a coronavirus clinic, braced for the onslaught

First in a series of reports from hospitals responding to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The doctor had treated patients in Liberia during the Ebola outbreak, in Saipan after a super typhoon, in the cholera-ravaged encampments of Haiti — and now she stood training a team for her next mission, this one in a carpeted Boston office overlooking a brick-oven pizza joint that was still serving pies.

“I don’t like to refer to Mass. General as a disaster setting, but this is a disaster we’re dealing with,” Lynn Black said, referring to the oncoming surge of Covid-19 cases at the Harvard teaching hospital.

Just four hours before, a few blocks away in a portrait-lined conference room, Massachusetts General Hospital’s incident commanders — the leaders who take the reins from the usual executives to get through an emergency — had pulled up a slide that illustrated what she meant. It depicted, in colored bars, the number of inpatients known to be infected with the new coronavirus over the past two weeks,