As hospitals in Louisiana bear the brunt of one of the nation’s swiftest and most deadly coronavirus outbreaks, health care workers from around the country are coming to the Pelican State to treat patients and to take some pressure off hospital staffers.

HCA Healthcare sent 15 nurses this week from Kansas City-area hospitals to help at Tulane Medical Center, which it manages, and HCA has 200 more signed up to volunteer, if needed. Ochsner Health System officials said Thursday that they had recruited more than 140 nurses from other states to help plug their staffing needs. And the Louisiana Board of Medical Examiners has granted 35 emergency temporary permits to doctors and respiratory therapists so far, many of whom have not arrived yet.

Amelia Ellsworth, a critical-care nurse from Missouri who’s helping at Tulane, said she can tell locals are heartbroken when they realize her first trip to the city is in the midst of a raging pandemic. An Uber driver insisted on making sure she got a peek at the French Quarter after one of her shifts, while the shuttle driver on the way in from Louis Armstrong International Airport played some zydeco to welcome her cohort of nurses.

New Orleans nurse who died from coronavirus was the 'backbone' for nurses, friends say A New Orleans-area nurse on the front lines of treating patients with coronavirus — and who contracted the virus herself — has died amid the p…

“You can just tell it’s such a vibrant city,” Ellsworth said.

But that vibrancy can be hard to see from the confines of the hospital, where health care workers say coronavirus patients are among the sickest people they’ve ever treated. Olivia Breeland, an ICU nurse at Tulane, said the hospital tries to maintain a two-to-one ratio of ICU patients per nurse.

Having the reinforcements helps the hospital to keep the ratio low even when patient numbers grow, she said.

“This kind of nursing is challenging,” Breeland said, explaining that hospital workers are using unfamiliar medicines in IV drips, using different ventilator settings and “proning” patients — turning them onto their stomachs while they’re on ventilators to help them breathe better.

“There’s something to learn every day,” Breeland said. “I don’t believe there is any harder ICU patients than what we have.”

Ellsworth, who works for CenterPoint Medical Center in Independence, Missouri, said she knew the patients she was working with would be very sick. But reading about the outbreak and experiencing it in real life are totally different, she said.

As more “surge sites” open to handle influxes of coronavirus patients, hospitals say they are increasingly looking for additional help. Baton Rouge General, which is opening its Mid City campus as a surge site, has hired 38 clinicians to help there in the past few days, but still needs additional nurses, therapists and other clinical staffers, according to spokeswoman Meghan Parrish.

+9 Louisiana nurses face stark choices between personal protection, coronavirus patient care For Louisiana nurses on the front lines of a coronavirus outbreak that ranks among the biggest in the nation, the most perilous moment of a sh…

Our Lady of the Lake officials said this week that they are also making use of nurses from different backgrounds and specialties to help handle the influx of coronavirus patients. The hospital’s director of nursing, Corrie Presley, described “nurses coming out of the woodwork” to help.

Others are still trying to figure out the right ways to pitch in. Dr. James Pettey, an orthopedic surgeon in Kentucky, said he’s been contacting New Orleans hospitals, trying to find a way that he can volunteer. He’s been granted an emergency permit to practice medicine in Louisiana, but says he hasn’t found a central location to figure out where his help might be needed.

The red tape has been frustrating, he said.

“I literally could have arranged a trip to West Africa and been in a hospital over there in the time that it’s taken me to do this in the United States,” he said.

Pettey said he realized that the services of orthopedic surgeons aren't in high demand with the coronavirus, but he noted that he completed a family medicine residency and said he can help to fill whatever manpower shortages are needed. That could include assessing and diagnosing patients, working with non-coronavirus patients in emergency rooms or backfilling on other surgeries to free up other physicians, he said.

Others who have received emergency permits are helping from afar with telemedicine and virtual medicine services.

Dr. Rita Beckford, who works for the national company Premise Health, got an emergency Louisiana permit in hopes that offering video-based visits with patients could help clear local emergency rooms of people who mostly need primary care instead of coronavirus treatment, she said.

Breeland noted that asymptomatic people can still spread the disease to others, who might succumb to it. She said Tulane’s ICU has had coronavirus patients from their 30s to their 90s, and that obesity has been a common denominator among many of the sickest patients. But she warned against thinking that anyone was off-limits for coronavirus because of their age of health history.

Ellsworth said everyone should envision being diagnosed with coronavirus and being asked to list all of the places they visited and the people who they interacted with in the last 14 days.

“Would you be proud of your answer?” she asked. “And if the answer is no, you’ve got some lifestyle changes to make.”