Audio: Listen to this article. Available only to In the early weeks of the pandemic, New Yorkers paused every evening at seven o’clock to applaud the city’s frontline healthcare workers. The cheers, honking, and clattering of pots and pans could be heard from windows, fire escapes, and street corners as the city saluted those who repeatedly put themselves at risk for others. But as an August essay in the New York Times Magazine showed, many of these same frontline workers felt less supported in the hospitals where they were struggling to treat patients. From the Special Series: The story begins at a May conference meeting at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, which at the time had treated more Covid-19 patients than any other hospital in the country. The frontline physicians were exhausted and emotionally drained; they had spent months making grueling decisions about patient treatment, often at risk to their own health. Mangala Narasimhan, an intensive-care doctor, was anxious to return to her patients and knew that the discussion might be tense.