‘I’m mentally and physically exhausted’
N THE SOUTHEAST FLORIDA EMERGENCY room where 62-year-old nurse Penny Blake works, hospital administrators have locked up gloves, cleaning supplies and masks to keep them from disappearing. Twelve hundred miles away, at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, health care providers struggle with a similar dilemma. Faced with too few N95 respirators—specialized masks that are supposed to be worn for only up to eight hours—health care workers have begun hoarding them. Some doctors are spraying their masks with Lysol and keeping them in their lockers overnight. “Once you get one, the feeling is you keep it for as long as you
