This month's cover photo features an ED nurse ready to care for patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) at Antrim Area Hospital, Antrim, Northern Ireland. She is one of countless health care professionals working on the front lines of the deadly global pandemic, which World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called "the defining health crisis of our time" during a March 26 virtual summit. "We are at war with a virus that threatens to tear us apart," he stated.
Two additional photos on this page show scenes from the U.S. response to the virus. In one (below), a patient who tested positive for the virus is transferred in an isolation pod to an Omaha, Nebraska, hospital. In the other, personnel aboard the Navy hospital ship the Mercy-which arrived in Los Angeles on March 27-prepare to admit their first patients. The Mercy's sister ship, the Comfort, docked in New York City on March 30; both ships will serve as referral hospitals for non-COVID-19 patients in order to alleviate the strain on local hospitals.
As U.S. cases of the virus exploded in March, hospital employees across the country shared accounts of unsafe working conditions. Many said their hospitals were unprepared for the influx of patients and unable to provide sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE). One such worker discussed her experience in an AJN blog post, "Deserted: Note from a Young ICU Nurse as COVID-19 Pandemic Intensifies in U.S." (https://wp.me/p7sy0l-7wH). She described how, because of rationing, she and other nurses weren't allowed to wear PPE while caring for a patient with a suspected case of the virus.
"Despite our suspicions that the patient had COVID, we were not able to protect ourselves," she wrote. "Hospital staff like me who worked closely with the patient were not informed that he had become an official suspected case until after test results came back, resulting in widespread exposures to staff and their families. . . . Some staff who knew they were exposed were never contacted at all." On AJN's blog and Facebook page, readers echoed the writer's concerns and expressed fears for their safety.
To provide nurses an outlet to talk about their experiences working during the pandemic, the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and AJN have launched the Frontline Nurses WikiWisdom Forum (https://nurses.wikiwisdomforum.com). Here, nurses can write about the challenges, fears, and ethical dilemmas they may be facing, and also share what they're learning. Ultimately-once the pandemic has passed-the collective wisdom generated by this online conversation will lay the foundation for a "Never Again" report published by AJN.
AJN has also created a resources page, "COVID-19 Watch: Pandemic Update for Nurses" (https://journals.lww.com/ajnonline/Pages/covid.aspx), where readers can access a free and regularly updated collection of relevant writings, podcasts, and websites. To read more about COVID-19 in this issue, see "Life, Interrupted" (As We Went to Press-A Note from Our Editor-in-Chief) and "The United States Responds to COVID-19" (In the News).-Diane Szulecki, editor