Maddalena Ferrari lets herself cry when she takes off the surgical mask she wears even at home to protect her elderly parents from the coronavirus that surrounds her at work in one of Italy’s hardest-hit intensive care units.

In the privacy of her own bedroom, where no one can see, the nursing coordinator peels away the mask that both protects her and hides her, and weeps for all the patients lost that day at Bergamo’s Pope John XXIII Hospital.

“We’re losing an entire generation,” Ferrari said at the end of one of her shifts. “They still had so much to teach us.”