Even worse, he was left in an open area of the hospital’s ER for hours.

DALLAS (AP) — A Liberian Ebola patient was left in an open area of a Dallas emergency room for hours, and the nurses treating him worked for days without proper protective gear and faced constantly changing protocols, according to a statement released late Tuesday by the largest U.S. nurses’ union.

Nurses were forced to use medical tape to secure openings in their flimsy garments, worried that their necks and heads were exposed as they cared for a patient with explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting, said Deborah Burger of National Nurses United.

Burger convened a conference call with reporters to relay what she said were concerns of nurses at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, where Thomas Eric Duncan — the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S. — died last week.

Duncan died Oct. 8, and the hospital said Sunday that one of his nurses had tested positive for Ebola. She is hospitalized and was listed Tuesday in good condition.

On Wednesday, Texas health officials announced that a preliminary test indicated a second, unidentified health care worker at the hospital had been infected with the disease.