Coronavirus patients in New York will have to resort to using bag valve masks if the Empire State doesn't have enough ventilators, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a press conference on Saturday.

The state anticipates it will need 140,000 hospital beds and 30,000 ventilators at its "highest point of need" – that is, when coronavirus infections are projected to hit their apex in 14 to 21 days, Cuomo said.

Failure to obtain these ventilators means that patients will need to have air pumped manually into their lungs with a bag valve mask, he said.

"It's a manual ventilator and someone squeezes the bag continuously," Cuomo said. "This looks easy, but if you do this for any length of time, you see how difficult it winds up being."

"This is the alternative if you don't have a ventilator," he said.

New York has already purchased about 3,000 bag valve masks and ordered 4,000 more, according to Cuomo.

"We're even talking about training National Guard people to learn how to operate this device, which is relatively simple to operate, but you need a lot of people to operate this 24 hours a day for each patient," he said.