As the surge in new coronavirus patients threatens to overwhelm Bay Area hospitals, some are preparing by aggressively ramping up the hiring of nurses, reshuffling staff and even asking recent retirees to return.

Even before COVID-19 posed a risk to the U.S., many hospitals around the country — including San Francisco General Hospital — were woefully short of nurses and other frontline health care workers. Now, as the coronavirus tears through the country, hospitals everywhere are competing for a limited pool of experienced talent.

In particular, staff shortages in San Francisco’s public hospitals have largely been attributed to sluggish hiring protocols mandated by the city as well as a nationwide dearth of nurses. Officials must also contend with a new reality of the pandemic: Frontline medical staff are extremely vulnerable to contracting the virus, and a glut of vacancies could also emerge if staff members must quarantine themselves.

Two staff members at Laguna Honda tested positive for the virus, officials said Monday, but no further information was available. That comes after staff there complained about a lack of preparedness to deal with an outbreak.

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To prepare for the onslaught of cases, Mayor London Breed issued an emergency measure last week that temporarily cut bureaucratic steps in the hiring process, slashing the time it takes to hire a nurse from more than six months to just a few weeks.

Officials said Monday that the city hired 82 permanent nurses over the past two weeks and still hopes to hire at least 28 more — a goal that could increase as demand grows.

“We took control,” said Michael Brown, director of human resources for the health department. “Hopefully this will be something that we can use in the future as we look at nurse hiring.”

The department held a “hiring fair” last weekend, where candidates who previously applied for a job — but likely had been waiting months to hear back due to the old hiring protocols — were invited to complete the onboarding process. The “fair” was invitation-only and was held in accordance with the city’s social distancing mandates. There will be another one on Wednesday.

Officials are also reaching out to recent retirees to see if they would be willing to come back to work, The Chronicle has learned.

According to an email obtained by The Chronicle, the department said it might need recent retirees for a range of jobs, including a 24/7 call center and other opportunities that don’t involve patient contact.

“The COVID-19 virus pandemic is here, and we may need your help!” read the email.

One recent retiree who received the email last week said she would be willing to rejoin the workforce during the pandemic. But she said it is unclear how, exactly, the city would reinstate her license and allow her to work again.

The Chronicle agreed not to name the retiree in accordance with its anonymous sources policy. The retiree — who asked to remain anonymous so she didn’t hurt her potential job prospects — said she decided “pretty early on” during the coronavirus outbreak that she would be willing to go back to work if she was needed.

“Getting this email from the city helped because it sounds like they would make it easy, which would be nice,” she said.

Meanwhile, Laura Wagner, an associate professor at UCSF’s School of Nursing and Healthforce Center, said while hospitals around the country are scrambling for more staff, many of her students are getting shut out of the clinical hours they need to graduate.

Wagner said some area hospitals have told many students to stop coming in for their clinical rotations, as they attempt to limit the number of people who could spread the virus inside the facilities. Hospitals also want to reshuffle nurses who typically work with the students into other roles, she said.

By not completing their clinical rotations, many might not be able to graduate and join the workforce, she said.

Elsewhere, officials for both Sutter Health and Stanford Medicine said they were reshuffling their staff to respond to the needs of the pandemic.

The increased efforts around hiring frontline staff come as coronavirus cases in California reached 2,011, with 131 in San Francisco as of Monday afternoon. At a press conference Monday, Department of Public Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax said “the worst is yet to come” and he expects to see a surge of patients who require hospitalization in the next week or two — if not sooner.

State officials said Friday that California has significantly expanded its testing, with 23,200 tests completed as the number of cases of COVID-19 grew to more than 1,200. Still tests are so hard to come by that even frontline nurses with symptoms of the virus complain they are unable to get tested.

But as testing grows, so will confirmed cases. It may become increasingly hard for hospitals to find the much-needed talent, said Iman Abuzeid, CEO of Incredible Health, a San Francisco-based job matching website for nursing vacancies.

Abuzeid called the nursing shortage the “biggest skilled labor shortage in the country.” California, in particular, limits its labor pool by not recognizing out-of-state licenses. She also said that more nurses retire than graduate into the workforce from nursing schools.

“Ultimately, our demand for health care as a country is going up, but we just don’t have enough workers in the system,” she said. “We just don't have enough supply to keep up with the demand.”

Meanwhile, some nurses who desperately want to help out are still stymied by the state’s bureaucracy.

Kris Elford, 44, a Canadian who lives in Santa Clara County, said she has been trying to renew her inactive Canadian license for the past few weeks. But she said she was told she needs to retake her board exam if she wants to work in California — a near-impossible task now that the tests have been postponed due to the virus.

So for now, Elford, a nurse with over 20 years of experience, is sitting idle, waiting for her paperwork to go through.

“I don’t mind going wherever they need me,” she said. “If we are following the trajectory of Italy, we need to be ready with more nurses that can work.”

Trisha Thadani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadani