TAMPA — As states across the American South and West grapple with shortages of vital testing equipment and a key antiviral drug, hospitals are being flooded with coronavirus patients, forcing them to cancel elective surgeries and discharge patients early, as doctors worry that the escalating hospital crunch may last much longer than in earlier-hit areas like New York.

Even as regular wards are being converted into intensive care units and long-term care facilities are being opened for patients still too sick to go home, doctors say they are barely managing.

“When hospitals and health care assistants talk about surge capacity, they’re often talking about a single event,” said John Sinnott, chairman of internal medicine at the University of South Florida and chief epidemiologist at Tampa General Hospital.

Florida is struggling with one of the worst outbreaks in the country, along with Texas, California and Arizona: 43 intensive care units in 21 Florida counties have hit capacity and have no beds available.

Thomas Dobbs, the state health officer, said on Thursday.

“Mississippi hospitals cannot take care of Mississippi patients,” he said.

At the 463-bed hospital operated by Eisenhower Health in Rancho Mirage, Calif., east of Los Angeles, the coronavirus case count has gone from less than a dozen in May to 77 this week.

Most of the 34 intensive care beds are full, nearly half of them occupied by people who have been infected.

Diego Maselli Caceres at University Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, said he has watched a sevenfold surge of Covid-19 patients needing intensive care over the past month, filling up three floors of the hospital instead of one.

Hospital bed capacity, including in I.C.U.s, is generally used to gauge a region’s health care infrastructure and the preparedness of its hospitals to respond to the coronavirus.

Hospitals can “pivot enough space,” said Jay Wolfson, professor of public health at the University of South Florida.

beds, said that the system was clogged up by patients, sent from nursing homes, who had recovered but had not yet received the all-clear.

Roopa Ganga, an infectious disease specialist at two hospitals near Tampa, said that they lacked sufficient supplies of remdesivir, the antiviral drug, forcing her to choose which patients needed it the most.

Wolfson, from the University of South Florida, said health authorities and public officials needed to collaborate better to bypass regulations that bar out-of-state nurses from working in Florida.

Traveling nurses were brought in to the Eisenhower Health hospital in California’s Riverside County.

Alan Williamson, the chief medical officer, because the 3-to-1 nurse-to-patient ratio is much higher even for Covid-19 patients who are not in the intensive care beds?

In Corpus Christi, Texas, one of the state’s fastest spreading outbreaks has pushed hospitals to convert floors to treat Covid-19 patients as they scramble to find extra staff, especially nurses.

Rick Stern, a veteran oncology nurse who works with the Covid-19 patients at Eisenhower Health, said the job is a constant churn of gloves, gowns, masks, face shields and heart-wrenching misery