In 2011, Dr. Breen was promoted to the helm of the emergency department, where colleagues said she tended to solve problems with systematic precision and preferred concrete solutions.

She liked structure, said Dr. James Giglio, who was then her boss. She liked working in an organized world.

That world would later distort and crumple. By early this year, the coronavirus was slipping into New York, undetected and underestimated.

In late February, as elected officials were still assuring the public that the virus did not pose a serious threat, Dr. Breen sat down at her computer and updated a contingency plan addressed to her family. It was a compilation of instructions on where to find her passwords, routes she would use if she had to get out of the city and how family members should contact one another.

She had created it after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and revised it after Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012 it was her methodical response to calamity.

The coronavirus, she was convinced, would catch hospitals off guard.

A week later, she went on a planned vacation with Ms. Feist, her sister, in Big Sky, Mont. They sat in a hot tub and mused about going to Italy in a few years. By the time Dr. Breen returned from the trip, a state of emergency had been declared in New York.

At the Allen, discussions about staffing and supplies escalated. A lawyer from New Rochelle, N.Y., had been diagnosed recently with Covid-19 even though he had not traveled to any areas where the disease was known to be spreading. It was one of the first indications that the virus had already taken hold in the state, and a red flag for the NewYork-Presbyterian system, where he was a patient.

Link:

I Couldnt Do Anything: The Virus and an E.R. Doctors Suicide - The New York Times