SEATTLE _ For Robin Addison, Jan. 20 was like any other Monday night. She had just slipped into her pajamas after a long day of work at Providence Regional Medical Center when, around 8:30 p.m., she got a phone call from a fellow nurse.
"Robin, I think we have to open the unit," she recalls Sarah Wilkerson saying.
"The unit" is a pop-up biohazard chamber that can be erected to quarantine someone with an infectious disease. The hospital obtained it in 2015 with Ebola patients in mind. It had never been used.
Wilkerson, the hospital's infection prevention manager, explained that a Snohomish County man had tested positive for a new coronavirus that broke out late last year in Wuhan, China. He was the first confirmed case in the United States, and he was on his way to Providence.
Addison pulled her scrubs on and went back to the hospital.
