Two medical staff wearing protective suits treating a woman infected with coronavirus inside an isolation ward at a hospital. Photo: Mongkolchon Akesin/Shutterstock.com

Rushing to rapidly expand its hospital system, New York is looking to enlist doctors and nurses from health insurers to help deal with a looming flood of coronavirus patients.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo says the state's Department of Financial Services is requesting that health insurers reveal the number of health care workers they employ. His office says the state wants the figures so they can contact the employees and ask them to temporarily work in the medical field during the pandemic.

"We would like them to help in hospitals, because this is not about assessing insurance claims at this point. This is about saving lives," Cuomo said Monday. He also delivered a mandate that hospitals increase their capacity by at least half.

The third-term Democrat issued a dire message Tuesday, warning the disease is infecting people at a quicker clip and the state could see the virus' peak in two to three weeks. That timeline is far earlier than a previous projection that placed the coronavirus apex in early May.

Cuomo also pleaded with federal officials to start using the Defense Production Act and chided them for not providing New York with a stockpile of 20,000 ventilators to deal with the respiratory illness. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is sending 400 ventilators, he said, but the state will need up to 30,000.

"What am I going to do with 400 ventilators when I need 30,000?" Cuomo said. "You pick the 26,000 people who are going to die because you only sent 400 ventilators."

If the federal stockpile is sent to New York, Cuomo pledged to send the equipment to other areas of the country once the state passed the peak of the virus.

New York has become the epicenter of the nation's coronavirus outbreak with state government reporting more than 25,600 cases of COVID-19 and 210 deaths related to the virus.

The majority of the COVID-19 cases are tied to New York City, which has more than 14,900 cases, according to the state government. Westchester and Nassau counties also have thousands of cases, officials reported.

Under a past projection, New York could have needed 110,000 hospital beds at the peak of the crisis, but Cuomo said Tuesday the state could need up to 140,000 of those beds. New York needs about 40,000 intensive care unit beds at the height of the virus, but the state only has 3,000 of those beds, he said.

"Those are troubling and astronomical numbers, and as I mentioned, are higher numbers than had been previously projected," he said.