As an emergency medicine physician in New York City, Dr. Kamini Doobay has always known that death is part of the territory when trying to care for the city's sickest.
But it hasn't always been like this patients hit the hardest by the coronavirus, struggling to breathe and on ventilators, with no visitors allowed because of strict protocols to prevent spreading the virus.
So often a patient will be on their deathbed, dying alone, and it's been incredibly painful to see the suffering of family members who I call from the ICU, hearing the tears, crying with them on the phone," said Doobay, 31.
Too many people are dying alone with absolutely no family around them," she said. This is one of the most horrific things."
We did not go into this field thinking we're going to be martyrs," she said. This is a serious crisis that we're in and we deserve to be protected. We're not in a battlefield. We're not in a war zone."