More than 300 members of staff at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) are reportedly unable to work because they, or someone in their household, has coronavirus symptoms.
And 73 members of staff have tested positive for the deadly bug, out of 181 who have been tested.
It's claimed that social distancing in the hospital is 'a fiction' with concerns raised by University College London professor Anthony Costello about "the use of masks in non-clinical hospital areas".
He claims that a source inside the famous children's hospital said: "Nurses, doctors, admin, cleaners are expressly discouraged from wearing masks around the hospital.
"Is our cultural reluctance to wear masks an error? Staff will be happy to bring their own masks from the chemist if given permission.”
There was a nationwide run on masks when the coronavirus outbreak first threatened the UK.
Experts at the time said they did not help the spread of the virus - however the World Health Organisation are now considering reviewing their guidance.
In China, Korea and other developed countries close to where the outbreak originated the wearing of masks in public is a societal norm.
During the Covid-19 outbreak GOSH has limited hospital visitors to one carer per family and it has to be the same carer per day.
Siblings have been barred from visiting.
The hospital employs more than 4,000 staff overall and deals with 268,000 patients a year.
The Government have been slammed for a nationwide shortage of PPE for frontline NHS staff and a failure to perform an adequate number of tests.
The chief executive of the Health Service Executive has said officials are "working hard" to resolve a shortage of testing materials for coronavirus.
Paul Reid appealed to the public to "bear with us" as the HSE tries to address the worldwide issue.
He was speaking after it emerged that Ireland is falling short of the target number of tests being carried out each day.
In a tweet he said: "In a short time we have scaled up on, testing centres, testing kits, contact tracers, nbr of Labs, hospital beds, ICU, ventilators, PPE, staff.
"Our current major issue is 'reagents' for labs.
"A worldwide shortage. We are working hard to fix this. Bear with us."
On Wednesday it was confirmed there had been 14 more deaths and 212 new cases of Covid-19 in the Republic of Ireland.
Eighty-five people have died since the outbreak began in the Republic.
On Thursday the head of the Department of Public Health and Epidemiology at the Royal College of Surgeons said that increasing contact tracing of people with symptoms would work more effectively than waiting for test results.
Professor Ruairi Brugha told RTE's Morning Ireland: "Instead of having delays of up to 10 days, we can move in when people have symptoms and start contact tracing at that point."
