WASHINGTON—In New York’s Central Park this week, there were people out jogging, skateboarding, reportedly passing joints and bottles around, displaying a perhaps too-normal attitude to park life in the city that has become the North American epicentre of the coronavirus crisis. But those people wouldn’t have needed to look far for a reminder of how far from normal this public health emergency has become.

Behind a fence guarded by police on the east side of the park, 14 white tents have been pitched to form an emergency field hospital — the first time one has been set up in Central Park since the Civil War. Inside that fence is a “hot zone,” according to Ken Isaacs, the vice-president of Samaritan’s Purse, the organization running the hospital in coordination with New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital Network.

“If you were back in the hospital right now, you would find there’s a level of intensity,” Isaacs said Thursday from a mobile command office on Fifth Ave. Inside those tents, 55 patients were being treated for COVID-19, including nine intensive-care patients on ventilators. The field hospital’s capacity is 68 beds, 10 of which have ICU capability. About a dozen more patients were expected to be transferred to the facility Thursday.

Samaritan’s Purse is an aid group run by evangelical Christians that sets up field hospitals in war zones and natural disaster areas around the world. Isaacs says he “never imagined” it would set one up in the United States.

Dr. Elliott Tenpenny, the director of the group’s international health unit, says the situation made it necessary. “This is here in Central Park. It’s not in a war zone, it’s not in a sudden-onset disaster, it’s not an earthquake, but the level of need is comparable,” he said through an N95 respirator mask. “The numbers that we’re seeing are honestly comparable to other disasters that we’ve been in, and it looks quite similar.”

On Wednesday, according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York state had 18,000 patients hospitalized with the coronavirus. That day, 799 died in what was the highest single-day total so far. In New York City alone, according to an NBC report, 5,280 people had died by Thursday.

And although the rise in new cases appears to be gently levelling off, the volume of patients is overwhelming the hospital system. Refrigerated trucks serve as makeshift morgues. A navy hospital ship has docked in New York harbour to help pick up the slack.

In response, Mount Sinai has doubled its number of ICU rooms, reopened shuttered wings of the hospital that had been under construction, even converted its “fancy atrium” to hospital rooms, said Dr. Brendan Carr, its head of emergency medicine. Less than two weeks ago, Carr began talking to Samaritan’s Purse about setting up the field hospital.

It opened and began accepting patient transfers on April 1.

Isaacs says there’s a major difference from the work he usually does in war zones. “You don’t normally set up for an emergency next to a world-class hospital research centre, and all of its services.”

Some have objected to the presence of Samaritan’s Purse, whose founder Franklin Graham expresses anti-LGBT and anti-Muslim views, and asks volunteers to sign a “statement of faith” endorsing opposition to same-sex marriage. Mayor Bill de Blasio was among those who expressed discomfort with the group’s presence.

Isaacs acknowledged that the field hospital’s staff and volunteers are “Christians,” in line with the organization’s mission, but said the group’s views don’t influence treatment. “There’s no discrimination. Period. For anyone, for any reason. All the patients come to us directly after clinical assessment from Mount Sinai and everything that Samaritan’s Purse does is based on need,” he said. He added that Mount Sinai and Samaritan’s Purse both have “strong policies” forbidding discrimination.

The two organizations had planned to open a second field hospital in a cathedral, which were halted after reports of “tension” about Graham’s beliefs and statements on LGBT and Muslim issues, and amid reports that the growth in hospitalizations is slowing.

On the news that the virus may be slowing its predation on New Yorkers, Carr warns against complacency. “The hospitals are still very, very full,” he noted.

From inside the park, Isaacs says it’s very important people not drop their guard and allow the virus spread to ramp back up.

Earlier in the week, Isaacs drove past the back of Mount Sinai’s hospital. “There were probably 40 or 50 ambulances back there. They’re bringing people in from everywhere. And I just want to acknowledge that the health care workers in this city are warriors, and they’re truly fighting the war right now,” he said.

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“Samaritan’s Purse is really a blip here, because we did something unusual. But the real people that are fighting this and saving lives are the cleaners, the doctors, the nurses. It’s the whole gamut of people that are in the background. And they’re going to work every day. They’re risking their lives, putting themselves in harm’s way and they’re in a war.

“It’s a war that’s going on here.”