Although she has seen hundreds of coronavirus patients since early March, Honolulu native Dr. Lina Miyakawa, a pulmonologist and intensive-care physician in New York City, vividly remembers the first case to arrive at the hospital where she works.

“The patient was a middle-age woman with a couple of garden-variety medical problems: high blood pressure, some heart disease,” Miyakawa said. “She was feeling run down, with shortness of breath, a cough, a little bit of diarrhea.”

The woman quickly got worse. Within six hours she was intubated and placed on a mechanical ventilator in a negative-pressure room, which reduces the risk of airborne infection, but “unfortunately, she didn’t make it; she went into organ failure,” Miyakawa said.

By April 3, when Miyakawa spoke to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser by phone from her Lower East Side apartment, New York had become the epicenter of the outbreak, and “we have not rested since,” the 34-year-old doctor said. “The panic is palpable every single day, wherever I go.”

Because Hawaii lags behind New York on the coronavirus curve, Miyakawa wanted to “spread the word back home” about ways we can protect ourselves and others and prevent explosive growth in cases here.

First and foremost, “The public should really be staying home,” following government lockdown orders, and when out for essential reasons, keep social distancing and avoid groups, she said.

“Not touching your face is so difficult, I know,” she said, “but bear in mind your fingers won’t transmit the virus to your eyes, nose and mouth so long as you’re diligent about washing your hands and, on a day-to-day basis, wiping down things you touch such as doorknobs, faucets and light switches.”

While we should wear masks as health authorities now advise, Miyakawa said, that means cloth or simple paper masks that can screen out larger particles such as droplets, not the surgical or N95 respirator masks that are in short supply around the globe and should be reserved for health care and other lifesaving professionals.

“If we can’t get enough of these supplies in Manhattan, and we’re attached to the mainland, there’s no way that in Hawaii we’ll have enough” if the disease spirals out of control, she said.

As an intensivist who regularly performs CPR as well as intubations and other close-proximity procedures, Miyakawa said she and other front-line workers are in the highest-risk category of contracting COVID-19.

“It’s highly possible I already have it and am asymptomatic,” she said, noting that ensuring health care workers don’t spread the virus is another reason they need more personal protective equipment. She and her colleagues wear goggles or face shields and surgical masks over reusable N95 respirator masks, which filter out 95% of the very smallest airborne particles.

As to whether the new coronavirus can go airborne and farther than the 6-foot range for droplets, Miyakawa said she relies on information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, which say the virus is transmitted through droplets and contact.

“‘Droplet’ doesn’t mean it disappears right away; it does hang around — if you sneeze and somebody walks through the cloud, they could inhale it — but that doesn’t mean it’s airborne.”

Before she leaves work, to avoid carrying the virus out of the hospital, she washes down well and changes her clothes.

Despite the dire situation in her workplace at Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital and throughout the city, Miyakawa said she still loves New York, sounding cheerful and relaxed on her day off at home with her partner and her long-haired dachshund, ordering takeout.

“Every day at 7 p.m. we have everybody cheering for us (first responders),” she said. “And Gov. (Andrew) Cuomo, saying New Yorkers have gone through so much, including 9/11, we’re going to get through this. We’re New York tough.”

Miyakawa was last in Honolulu visiting family in January. A graduate of Punahou School, New York University and the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine, she moved to New York to do her residency 10 years ago.

Above all, she said, she’s happy and energized to be doing what she was trained to do.

But one of the hardest things about the novel coronavirus, she said, is that the lockdown forbids in-person visits from patients’ loved ones, even at the end of their lives.

“In the very beginning we were still allowing some visitors to come,” she said. For instance, the family of the first coronavirus patient at the hospital “was able to come in and visit her in her final days.”

She had been trained, Miyakawa said, to make patients comfortable and respect their dignity at the end, but in the pandemic “it’s become very difficult to be able to treat people with the kind of compassion we normally do.”

Throughout the hospital, the staff deploys iPads and teleconferencing so “people can at least see their loved ones, and we have family meetings and are able to virtually hold their hands.”

Asked whether she felt afraid, Miyakawa said yes, noting that several medical workers in New York City had died of COVID-19, including a Mount Sinai Medical Center’s nurse in his 30s.

“A lot of people are feeling that way. I think it’s normal.”

But, she added, the overarching theme she wanted to convey is, “It’s really comforting when I walk to and from work that there’s nobody out on streets near me, that everybody’s doing their part by staying apart.”

This made her feel “pretty reassured this will end at some point,” the young doctor said.