If I had to put myself in their shoes I would react out of panic too, if all of a sudden my day to day was flooded by cases of this new respiratory disease. Doctors and nurses suffer the same sort of adverse selection bias as CFR data: you're not counting the healthy. The doctors are only ever exposed to the sick, day in and day out, not to the healthy who don't walk through their doors. They're experiencing a concentration of the negative effects, orders of magnitude worse than what's happening outside the hospital.