Americans Want to See What’s Happening in Hospitals Now. But It’s Hard for Journalists to Get Inside.

The coronavirus pandemic has been likened to a war. But journalists are largely absent from the harrowing, heartbreaking front line of this crisis: hospitals.

In a disaster with an invisible enemy—no burning buildings or swamped towns to photograph—it is emergency rooms and intensive-care units where the day-to-day human toll of the deadly illness is most plainly visible. But a combination of health worries and privacy concerns has made it extremely difficult for the members of the media to go into these places and capture a vivid, firsthand portrait of this facet of the crisis.