Sign up for our special edition newsletter to get a daily update on the coronavirus pandemic.

The volunteer group that was building a coronavirus field hospital at St. John the Divine is making an exodus before the center ever saw a patient.

A spokeswoman for the Samaritan’s Purse International Relief group slated to operate the 200-bed hospital told The Post Thursday that they are instead planning to set up alternate locations in the city on the advice of Mount Sinai Health System, which was expected to staff the site.

“Basically, the cathedral was willing to open its doors but Mount Sinai has asked us to move to alternate locations that are both strategically more effective and logistically easier,” Melissa Strickland said. “The disease is shifting and we need to be shifting as well.”

Pressed for more details, Strickland said “experts are assessing, looking at trends.”

She said they will move to sites “where we would be most useful.”

The Morningside Heights church could not immediately be reached for comment.

Video shot at the church Thursday morning showed masked workers clearing out the cathedral and loading the equipment into a waiting tractor-trailer.

The massive cathedral, previously lined with adjustable beds in anticipation of patients, was left barren as the truck pulled away.

The cathedral’s dean, the Right Rev. Clifton Daniel III, had previously told the New York Times that nine climate-controlled tents capable of holding at least 200 patients would be set up inside the cavernous site.

Daniel said the cathedral’s subterranean crypt would be used as “a staging area” for medical workers, while the 600-foot-long nave would accommodate the patients.

“The last thing like this was the flu pandemic in 1918, but the world was different then and I don’t think they used the cathedral in this way,” Daniel told the newspaper.

The site was expected to open Friday or early next week.

“We are assuming that there will be,” Patterson told the Times.

Lead volunteer Whitney Tilson said Samaritan’s Purse, a nondenominational evangelical Christian humanitarian group that erected a field hospital in Central Park, had already set up some beds before they had to halt the work.

“We’ve set up 56 beds so far. And they’ve had us now pause, even though we could probably set up a few more before the end of today because hospitalizations in New York have come down a little bit,” Tilson told Reuters.

“And so Mount Sinai wants to wait and keep an eye on the number of people coming in and hopefully we can cross our fingers that this was all for naught and no patients come in here,” Tilson added.

A spokesperson for Mount Sinai would not discuss details of the decision to abandoned the field hospital.

She said that “for context,” the majority of their patients come from Mount Sinai Brooklyn and Mount Sinai Queens but would not elaborate.