"The patients pull down their face masks and even vomit their food on the nurses," Wu said, adding that at least two nurses at Prince of Wales Hospital had been infected when patients vomited on them.
There are also more nurses than doctors in the pneumonia wards here, with 4,500 nurses caring for SARS patients, compared to 1,300 doctors.
The first health care worker to die here of SARS was a nurse, Lau Wing Kai. His funeral was held Wednesday.
Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa (董建華) ordered that Lau be buried at Gallant Garden, the cemetery for civil servants who die in the line of duty, even though Lau was technically not a civil servant because he worked for the Hospital Authority, a government-owned entity separate from the rest of the bureaucracy.
In addition to facing more risks than doctors, Hong Kong's nurses earn considerably less. The heavily unionized nurses at public hospitals here typically earn about US$38,000 a year, while staff doctors at the same hospitals earn close to US$80,000, said Joseph Lee, the chairman of the Association of Hong Kong Nursing Staff, the union that represents two-thirds of the territory's 30,000 nurses.
Pong said that she had no regrets about becoming a nurse despite the difficulties of the last two months. She decided that she wanted to be a nurse at the age of seven because she wanted to help people, and says she never wavered about what she wanted to do with her life.
SARS patients frequently become deeply depressed at their steep physical decline, and relieving that depression is as important in some ways as curing their bodies, Pong said.
"I'm a cheerful person and outgoing," she said, "and I feel that I can make them feel better."
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