Airway experts' work puts them inches from where virus lives

It starts with pulling on head-to-toe protective gear. Then comes a brisk walk down a hospital corridor, triple-gloved hands pushing a rattling anesthesia cart toward a door that leads to a frightened patient, gasping for air.

Hundreds of times every week during this pandemic, doctors and nurses treating critically ill COVID-19 patients steel themselves for a procedure that remains anything but routine.

These are the intubators, the airway experts inserting ventilator breathing tubes that place them mere inches away from where the contagious virus lives.

“You’re in COVID central when you’re intubating,” said Dr. Roy Soto, an anesthesiologist at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan. “They’re frequently coughing and gasping. With a vivid imagination, you can almost visualize the COVID particles drifting throughout the room.”

In normal times, these experts work with patients who need help breathing during elective surgery, operations for gunshot wounds and other emergency cases.

What’s different now is not just that how critically ill and highly contagious these ventilator patients are —it’s also the grim, mounting numbers. In hot spots like New York City and Detroit, some hospitals report inserting breathing tubes for 20 or more COVID-19 patients in one day, hundreds in the past month — at least double the normal rate. Most don’t survive.

“We’re all used to seeing sick people, just not over and over and over again,” Soto said.

“Just an unprecedented wave of patients has been coming into the hospitals,” said Angella Jones, a nurse anesthetist at Detroit’s Sinai-Grace Hospital who is president of the Michigan Association of Nurse Anesthetists.

“You are very fearful of contracting the virus just because of the closeness of you to...