At the end of February, Dr. Ryan Padgett’s colleagues in the emergency room called him over to share some news: A patient who had died the previous day had tested positive for the coronavirus — the first known death in the United States.
Everything, they knew, was about to change. Over the next several days, a parade of patients from a nearby nursing home was brought into the emergency room at EvergreenHealth in Kirkland, Wash., which emerged as the first center of the nation’s coronavirus outbreak.
