Courtney Fox felt bad. She’d gone to Draeger’s Sunday night to buy groceries for an Instacart customer in East Palo Alto, but, as usual these days, many shelves were bare. At least she got the last two bags of french fries and found a substitute for the Marie Callender’s frozen meals.

When Fox delivered the food, the elderly customer thanked her, saying she didn’t usually place such small orders.

“But the governor says we can’t leave our houses now,” said the customer, speaking shortly after Gov. Gavin Newsom asked all Californians over 65 and people with chronic illness to isolate themselves at home as a safeguard against the coronavirus.

“That poor lady,” said Cox, who’s been pulling lengthy days shopping and delivering via Instacart in recent weeks. “I was feeling so defeated, but when she said that, it gave me the resilience to go back out again the next day. We’re the equivalent of first responders now.”

Indeed, delivery services have become a lifeline during the coronavirus pandemic, bringing food and supplies to homebound people, and helping those who are stocking up for any contingencies. Underscoring this role, the sweeping shelter-in-place orders issued for six Bay Area counties that shut down nonessential commerce specifically exempt delivery people.

But the lifeline can be tenuous. Food delivery services such as Instacart, Good Eggs and Amazon Fresh were already backlogged on Monday with waits of two or three days for delivery. On Tuesday, a spot check of those services in San Francisco showed no current slots available.

Good Eggs did not immediately respond to a request for comments. Instacart said in a statement that delivery windows vary during the busiest request times. More windows can open up as more shoppers become available for specific stores, it said.

Amazon said that serving customers during this time was “critical”: “We’ve seen an increase in people shopping online for groceries and are working around the clock to continue to deliver grocery orders to customers as quickly as possible,” the company said in a statement.

“We’re really taxing the system,” said Phil Lempert, editor of SupermarketGuru.com. “This has pointed out that there’s a frailty to delivery. It can handle 3% or 4% of the nation’s groceries, but if we double, triple, quadruple that, it just doesn’t work.”

His advice: “People have to plan ahead now,” he said. “Don’t count on being able to get milk in an hour the way you used to.”

Another tip, for those who can, is to use “click and collect,” he said — order online, then drive to the store or restaurant to pick up the bagged food.

So many people now rely on delivery services that some are actively seeking thousands of new workers to meet demand. Safeway is hiring more than 2,000 workers for northern California stores, including both part-time and full-time delivery drivers, as well as in-store positions. Raley’s advertised that it is “mass hiring” for shoppers to handle online orders at dozens of its stores in the Bay Area and Sacramento.

Amazon is seeking 100,000 people nationwide to work at warehouses, delivery centers and Whole Foods grocery stores and adding $2 per hour to their pay, even as it warned in a blog post that many items were out of stock and deliveries would take longer than usual. On Tuesday, Amazon said that for the next three weeks its distribution centers will prioritize incoming shipments of high-demand products such as household staples and medical supplies.

Instacart, which relies on independent contractors, says it currently has the most shoppers it’s ever had working for it and has capacity to add still more.

“This past weekend, we saw the highest customer demand in Instacart’s history in terms of groceries sold on our platform,” it said in a statement.

Many new customers are signing up, with daily downloads of its iPhone app increasing fourfold last week, it said. It’s streamlined procedures for faster checkouts, canceling of out-of-stock orders. And it’s cutting off hoarders, introducing limits on some items.

All the delivery services said that health and safety are paramount and they encourage workers to take measures such as using hand sanitizer, and customers to opt for “contactless” delivery in which items are left outside a door. Instacart said about a quarter of customers are now using this new feature.

But some delivery people said they’re concerned about their exposure to infection.

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“I just delivered to a customer who told me she has had a fever for the last 10 days and is getting tested for the coronavirus!” wrote an Instacart shopper named Connie on a Facebook post. In a phone interview, Connie, a San Jose resident who declined to give her last name because she worried about having her personal information becoming public, said she left as soon as she could, and used copious amounts of hand sanitizer and cleaned her car’s interior with Clorox wipes.

Long-term, said Lempert, the food industry analyst, the current strain on delivery systems could accelerate their moves to robot and drone deliveries.

Instacart shopper Fox said the “doomsday prepper” panic buying started in earnest in late February. One day, she got an order with 16 cases of water and lots of canned goods. She delivered it, checked her app and “Boom, another big order,” she said. “More of these chunky monkeys, as I call them kept coming” — even as some store shelves were stripped bare.

At least customers were appreciative. For one giant order that required six trips up and down stairs, she scored a $100 tip.

“After those first three days, my body was shot,” she said. “It was mentally and physically draining. The number of waters from Costco and other places I was transporting, sometimes to second-story apartments. They were fricking heavy.”

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid