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.

When the New York Times produced a short Web documentary on one beleaguered hospital, it was with video clandestinely shot by a physician who worked there. Other journalists have been putting out the call to ask health-care workers to aid their reporting. But for the most part, the medical system’s struggle with coronavirus is a story told with secondhand observations and amateur cellphone footage. Continue reading.