The spread of the epidemic can be only contained, and SARS-CoV-2 transmission in hospitals reduced, by strict compliance with infection prevention and control measures (contact, droplet, and airborne precautions) (22,29). During the current epidemic, health care workers have been at an increased risk of contracting the disease and consequent fatal outcome owing to direct exposure to patients. Early reports from the beginning of the epidemic indicated that a large proportion of the patients had contracted the infection in a health care facility (as high as 41%), and that health care workers constituted a large proportion of these cases (as high as 29%). However, the largest study to date on more than 72 000 patients from China has shown that health care workers make up 3.8% of the patients. In this study, although the overall CFR was 2.3%, among health care workers it was only 0.3%. In China, the number of severe or critical cases among health care workers has declined overall, from 45.0% in early January to 8.7% in early February (4). This poses numerous psychological and ethical questions about health care workers’ role in the spread, eventual arrest, and possible consequences of epidemics. For example, during the 2014-2016 Ebola virus disease epidemic in Africa, health care workers risked their lives in order to perform life-saving invasive procedures (intravenous indwelling, hemodialysis, reanimation, mechanical ventilation), and suffered high stress and fatigue levels, which may have prevented them from practicing optimal safety measures, sometimes with dire consequences (30).