Shooting a documentary about local nurses during the COVID pandemic, without being allowed to film in a hospital, is a tricky issue. While most of the action is happening in the hospitals, since you can’t get any footage from inside of them I think a better story to focus on would be something like how the nurses are being affected by the pandemic, outside of their work (mentally). With this, visual evidence from inside the hospital is not technically necessary, as that won’t be the main focus of the dialogue. The proof of the chaos inside the hospitals instead comes from the nurses, recounting stories, maybe getting footage of them at home. You could even get time lapse footage from outside of the hospital in order to showcase how busy it is with the cars and people coming and going. To quote the reading,
“In editing, you abstract visual evidence that will serve as an accurate analog of the events that were filmed. And you organize it into a statement that will communicate to your audience—honestly, directly, and forcefully—what you know about the event.” (pg 101)
To create a story you don’t need to see every single detail of it. You create an abstraction of events, give just enough information that the viewer can grasp an understanding of what is going on. To do this, you could get a couple shots of a messy house, piled up laundry or dirty dishes in a sink. Take shots that emphasize how isolated the nurse is, alone at a dinner table, or looking at pictures of their loved ones. This, paired with a heartfelt interview where they recount how the current state of the world and their job has been causing extreme mental stress and loneliness, gives perfect visual evidence to pair with what the interviewee is saying, thus doing a good job at communicating information to the viewer.
Other footage that would work well could be things like, the nurse waking up to a loud alarm clock early in the morning for their shift, getting ready for work in an empty home. Touching on the topic of what the nurse does to help relieve stress, getting footage of them reading, exercising, or maybe even shots of any medications they take. The reading focuses a lot on connecting your dialogue with your visual evidence so the viewer has an easier time understanding and believing what you tell them, so all this footage would depend on the questions you decide to ask and what the nurse decides to talk about.