A nurse wearing an N95 mask works as intravenous therapy equipment hangs outside a Covid-19 patient’s door in a Stamford Hospital intensive care unit, on April 24, 2020, in Stamford, Connecticut. | John Moore/Getty Images

Doctors can now save many more lives from Covid-19 — until hospitals reach capacity.

When Theodore Iwashyna cared for his first Covid-19 patient in March, he felt a wave of terror wash over him. “I was convinced I was going to either die or get my family sick,” the pulmonologist and professor of critical care medicine at the University of Michigan recalls.

Little was known about the novel coronavirus then, and Iwashyna couldn’t stop thinking back to the last pandemic coronavirus, SARS, when more than half of all deaths in a nearby hotspot, Toronto, were hospital-acquired infections.

Nowadays, Iwashyna is less worried about himself, his family, or even