Even as regular wards are being converted into intensive care units and long-term care facilities open for patients still too sick to go home, doctors say they are barely managing.

Hospitals are scrambling to call back nurses and recruit new doctors. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced he was sending 100 nurses to help out Jackson Health System in Miami, which said it had already hired 80 extra nurses in the past two weeks. Jackson Memorial, its flagship hospital, has only 28 I.C.U. beds, out of a total of 234, available.

“When hospitals and health care assistants talk about surge capacity, they’re often talking about a single event,” said John Sinnott, chairman of internal medicine at the University of South Florida and chief epidemiologist at Tampa General Hospital. “But what we’re having now is the equivalent of a bus accident a day, every day, and it just keeps adding.”…

“I’m glad some of you are sheltered from what unbridled Covid-19 looks like. It’s a hell show,” a doctor at the hospital, Dr. Richard Loftus, posted to a Facebook physician group after a computer trainer at the hospital turned out to be infected.