BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — Candles flicker atop a cake. A family sings “Happy Birthday.” And outside, behind a glass door, Mohamed Mokhtar smiles even as a virus keeps him from stepping inside.

The song reaches its end. Mokhtar kneels by the door in front of his children, all their faces aglow. He looks at the cake.

“Don’t blow, don’t blow,” someone says. Too risky.

“You guys can blow,” Mokhtar tells his children. The candles flicker out.

It’s a birthday video from the coronavirus pandemic.

Thousands of New York City hospital workers like Mokhtar, a nurse at New York Presbyterian-Methodist Hospital in Park Slope, have spent weeks away from their families for fear of spreading the new coronavirus.

They’ve missed dinners, birthdays and, sometimes, last chances to see loved ones.

For three weeks, Mokhtar hasn’t had direct contact with his wife Yamilet Gomez and their son, 4, and daughter, 2. He can’t hug them, hold their hands or kiss them goodnight.

Instead, Mokhtar sees them through a glass door when they leave food outside for him every day.

“We only have words now,” Gomez said.

Gomez and the children temporarily moved out as the outbreak grew along with Mokhtar’s worries about spreading coronavirus to them. His gloves have ripped in the middle of procedures, coughing patients continue to flood the hospital’s emergency room and city and state officials warn of personal protective equipment shortages — there were just too many opportunities for contagion.

So Gomez and the kids first went to Mokhtar’s family’s house in Bay Ridge and then — after a coronavirus scare there — moved into Gomez’s parents’ home in Brighton Beach.

When Gomez sees Mokhtar, she can tell the pandemic is taking a toll. He works long days at the hospital. He wonders aloud when the outbreak will end. He’s so very thin, she said.

“He’s 32 and he’s as thin as he was when 16, 17,” she said.

It’s that 32nd birthday celebration that Gomez and her family captured on video. She has started taking videos of Mokhtar. People need to see the toll fighting the coronavirus pandemic is taking on health care workers like her husband, she said.

They’re sacrificing so much and might never see their families again, she said.

“I feel every day that this is the last time I’ll see him, I’ll speak to him,” she said. “COVID-19 doesn’t just make you sick, it takes you from your loved ones. You can’t even see them.”

And then there’s the children.

Gomez said they’re young and don’t quite understand why they can’t have contact with their father. So she started to paint them a picture — their father is a superhero.

One day, she passed along a pin for Mokhtar to wear when he sees their kids. It’s in the shape of a triangle, like a good superhero logo.

“Hero In Scrubs” it says.

And their children believe.

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