Imagine. In a hospital in this country in one of the 46 states without kits...there is a patient on ventilator. That has this. And nobody in the hospital is using any precautions to prevent its spread. Because no testing...Because the patient didn’t recently return from China and the CDC doesn’t approve testing for anyone who didn’t recently return from China...
Imagine this patient dies. The mortuary is now a biohazard zone. The embalmer has it now. It’s all over the funeral home...
But hey, at least that person didn’t recently return from China, so we can’t test for it and our number of dead remains 0.
In that case (someone in the ICU on a vent with no known cause) trust me, the nursing staff is all gowned up with masks.
This is the case during a normal flu season.
Since the days of Aids, the nurses have been hyper-vigilant in the ICU units. In many cases the ICU IS the isolation ward. Obviously in the larger hospitals there are special rooms. Not so much in rural and community hospitals.