“Yesterday was a really hard day,’’ said Chuck Morris, one of the two people now in charge of Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Personally speaking, I sort of went home in a tough place. We’re finding some rhythm, and then some bombs went off.’’

The room he was addressing had dealt with true explosions before. This was the place where the hospital’s incident command had convened seven years ago, in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings: the war room of a military-style hierarchy that, for the length of an emergency, replaces the executives who normally run the show.

This time, the bombs weren’t literal. They were cases of COVID-19 that had popped up in parts of the hospital where no one was expecting them: On Thursday, March 19, two patients had come in for other reasons — abdominal surgery for one, a bleeding episode for the other — only for their coronavirus infections to come to light after they’d bounced from unit to unit, potentially exposing over 100 workers.

“Today is another day,’’ Morris went on, around 8 a.m. Friday, March 20. “I’m not going to be hokey about it, but I want everyone to close your eyes, and we’re just going to take three deep breaths as a group, and then get ready to just face the day.’’

But then the door swung open, and in walked Shelly Anderson, the incident command’s section chief for planning, one of the straightest talkers in a room full of straight talkers. Attention soon turned to the hospital’s critical shortage of masks.

With the supply from China interrupted and a global explosion of demand, purchasers were scrambling to find the personal protective equipment, or PPE, that could help keep infections from spreading. Even as hospitals like the Brigham told non-essential staff to stay home, they still had hundreds of employees per shift — from surgeons to nurses to patient transporters to X-ray techs — who had to be there to help treat coronavirus, but also the bleeds and cancers and heart attacks that remained emergencies during a pandemic.

It was hard to track the shortage with precision, though, as the supplies were scattered around the hospital, boxes of them kept in different units for workers to use as needed. The stats up on the projector didn’t look good. “That says we’re burning through 9,000 procedure masks a day. That says we’re burning through 1,600 surgical masks a day, and we’re burning through 800 N95s a day, which are numbers we’ve never seen,’’ said Kevin Giordano, section chief for logistics.

At that rate, the hospital had enough for about two weeks — and the pandemic was supposed to get exponentially worse.

The issue was directly connected to Thursday’s COVID “bombs.’’ When they were first discovered, guidance from the public health department required that every staff member who’d had close contact with those infected patients for at least 15 minutes be furloughed for two weeks. It would potentially have shut down whole units of the hospital.

Other hospitals were feeling that strain, too — protecting patients, they said, meant having the staff to test and treat them — and they had convinced the state to shift the rules. Now, asymptomatic employees could keep working, as long as they weren’t caring for immune-compromised patients and went home if they felt even the slightest twitch of illness — and wore a mask.

What they were given were surgical or procedure masks, which can protect people from the wearer’s breathed-out germs, but not so much the other way around, only keeping out larger droplets. N95 respirators were sturdier, creating a seal that kept others’ respiratory particles out, but those were in even shorter supply, and were being reserved for caregivers who were doing procedures — inserting throat tubes, swabbing nostrils — that generated a potentially infected mist.

“We all don’t want to be fools,’’ said Julia Sinclair, an incident commander, who sat beside, but six feet away from, Morris. “If we can support this for one week, and then we run out of masks, have we really made the right decision?’’

No, they all agreed. They knew they needed to consolidate supplies, so they could better measure how many masks they had and control their use. But before rounding up all unused masks from their usual homes in different units, the group wanted to calm the staff by announcing exactly who would be eligible to get one. The problem was, they were still figuring that out.

Giordano wanted the collection to begin the moment the new masking policy was announced. “I want a team in place to go out and collect supplies, because I think there could be hoarding — rational, thoughtful, patient-centric hoarding,’’ he said.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the room, other members of incident command were hashing out exactly who would be getting masks on Monday.

Michael Klompas, an infectious disease physician and the hospital’s epidemiologist, worried about giving out masks according to job title. “That will lead to the mis-impression of different standards for different people. I think we should frame it in terms of patient contact,’’ he said.

They were still talking about it at 10:30, when they started videoconferencing with the clinical chairs of all academic departments, the sense of pressure mounting in anticipation of questions. They were still talking about it at noon, when they trooped off to a different conference room for a webcast to about 1,000 managers within the hospital, to answer questions about redeployment and pay and parking.

“We’ve had seven health care workers who’ve already been diagnosed with COVID and in a number of instances those people did develop symptoms on the job,’’ Klompas told the chairs. “A universal masking strategy is not going to be a cure-all, it’s not going to be a panacea unto itself . . . Say I’m the minimally sick employee and I wear a mask, but as we all do when we wear a mask, we adjust it constantly, and therefore you get virus on your hands. If you don’t wash your hands as well, that’s not going to work.’’

They weren’t going to make the 2:30 p.m. deadline they’d set themselves. Only at about 4, back in the headquarters of incident command, did they get close to a document that seemed like it might work. If your job entailed face-to-face contact with a patient for 10 minutes or greater, then you’d get issued a surgical mask. They started sending out the couriers with pushcarts to collect boxes of masks from different units.

Within an hour and a half, everything changed. Executives at Partners HealthCare — the health care system that includes the Brigham — had secured a new supplier of masks earlier that same day. It was quite a feat. The day before, the governor himself had asked President Trump how states were supposed to find supplies when the federal government kept outbidding them. “I got to tell you, on three big orders, we lost to the feds,’’ Governor Charlie Baker had said during a phone call between the president and the governors.

How had Partners done it? “If you place orders with the regular manufacturers, they’re going to get picked off for the federal stockpile before you get ’em . . . You’ve got to know how to maneuver your way through,’’ Peter Markell, the company’s chief financial officer, explained later.

“Part of our issue is who to trust,’’ said Lisa Scannell, Partners’ director of supply chain management. “Some suppliers are asking for money up front. . . . There’s a chance that the product may not come in.’’

But this offer had come in from a distributor they’d worked with before, and they jumped on it. They could get 1 million to 2 million masks a month. In return, they could offer a commitment to buy from this supplier long-term.

The masks would be spread out across the Partners system. They were not the coveted N95s. But it did mean there would be enough for every employee to wear one every day.

By last Wednesday morning, it looked as though the Brigham had stationed guards against the pandemic at every door.

“We think we have all the doors covered,’’ said Giordano. “Believe it or not, there are 122.’’ He also hoped to add a checkpoint at every entrance, where every worker would attest to the fact that they had no symptoms before going in. If employees needed another mask or something else they could go to one of the PPE distribution centers, where they would be asked to scan their employee badge.

Giordano headed up to one of those centers. For inpatient units, where coronavirus anxiety was especially high, Giordano had decided not to collect whatever masks were left. “There’s a lot of fear out there,’’ he said. “So on Friday night, we decided we didn’t want to kind of roll out an infantry . . . This way, they can also build some trust and faith in the distribution strategy. They know they can come in and can get what they need.’’

Not long before Giordano had to leave to get to the 8 o’clock incident command meeting, a nursing assistant named Francyele Fonseca came to pick up a face shield because she would be caring for a patient who was still under investigation for coronavirus.

“We’re not sure if they’re going to continue to provide us with the proper protective equipment,’’ she said. “It’s just scary. We don’t know if we’re going to be able to come in and have the proper gear to protect not only patients but ourselves as well.’’

Eric Boodman can be reached at eric.boodman@statnews.com.