Katz says, “I’m having a boy. His name is Asher. Asher will be my plus one.”

But sitting beside her bliss is uncertainty.

“It’s not knowing. It’s not knowing. How long is this going to be like this,” she said.

Katz will be a single mother after undergoing IVF.

“I’ve always wanted to have kids,” says Katz.

But when COVID-19 struck, this successful health care consultant lost her job.

Katz says, “And then all of a sudden, one day boss calls me up and says we can’t afford to pay you. We’re done.”

Katz planned ahead, has a support system and a nest egg but fears without a paycheck and two mouths to feed, she’ll quickly run out of money.

“So, I have a friend in New Jersey who is like a sister to me. She was going to come down for a few weeks, but can’t leave,” says Katz.

And she says a neighbor who planned on helping now fears he contracted COVID-19 which is, understandably, a fear that keeps Katz from leaving her Falls Church home.

Katz adds, “I’m also worried, are my friends going to expose me and my new baby to this virus?”

In fact, Katz says she’s being induced next week, about 10 days before her due date. Her advice, as an expert on navigating the health care system, is to talk with your doctor as soon as possible about hopes and concerns.

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Doctors, nurses and other medical professionals across the country are facing critical shortages of vital personal protective equipment (PPE) as the virus continues to grow in scope here in the U.S. Reports indicate that health care providers are being forced to reuse or make their own PPE equipment. This poses safety concerns not only to the workers themselves, but also to their families and their overall communities.

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The region’s hospitals are also taking much closer inventory of equipment such as ventilators and respirators, drugs like Albuterol inhalers, testing kits and personal protective equipment, or PPE, which includes masks, eye shields and gowns.

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The US is significantly behind on testing people for coronavirus compared to countries like South Korea and China, due to a series of delays and missteps trying to develop and roll out its own testing kits.

However, the US is finally starting to increase its testing capacity. Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Friday that New York had processed 10,000 new coronavirus tests overnight. He said that the state is now testing at a higher per-capita rate than South Korea or China — though it still lags far behind those countries in terms of the total number of people tested.

New York opened its first drive-through testing facility this week in New Rochelle, which has been the epicenter of the state’s earliest confirmed cases. Additional locations have sprung up as the US attempts to make up for lost time.

“We’ve been in discussions with pharmacies and retailers to make drive-through tests available in the critical locations identified by public-health officials,” President Trump said in a news conference last week.

The US now appears following the lead of South Korea, which has tested more than 140,000 people — many via drive-through locations that can administer tests in under 10 minutes, Reuters reported. This approach also helps limit healthcare workers’ exposure to the coronavirus.

Here’s what the drive-through operations look like across the US.

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