MYRTLE BEACH, SC (WBTW) – Grand Strand Medical Center was seeing 170 less patients than usual at the start of the pandemic, prompting them to move employees around and make room for COVID-19 patients.

News13 spoke to one nurse who normally works on a medical surgical floor, and now has worked on four different floors, including the COVID-19 isolation units.

Grand Strand Medical Center nurse Kara Booth would normally be working on four south to treat patients, but now with the pandemic she’s being redeployed to other floors to help with efforts throughout the hospital.

“It’s a hospital, 24/7,” said Grand Strand Health CFO Robert Grace. “It never stops.”

Kara Booth has worked on four different floors, one of which is normally a medical surgical floor and is now a floor where COVID-19 patients are being treated.

“Let’s see, I’ve gone to two north, one east, two east, and three east,” she said. “We have up to four patients a piece without a nurse’s aide, and so really it was the time management initially just getting everything that the nurse’s aides do as well as our nursing duties, and then also making sure donning and doffing the PPE correctly.”

Intensive care unit nurses are now the ones taking care of the most sick COVID-19 patients.

CFO Robert Grace says they made the changes after seeing the hospital’s census drop.

“We didn’t know what we were getting into,” he said.

But they were able to keep all of their in-house staff and give them what’s called ‘pandemic pay’. They are able to give these workers 70% of their pay if they are sent home, and 30% of the pay can come from paid time off.

“We felt very strongly that we needed to protect those full time and part time employees,” said Grace.

For Booth, who was at one time taking care of three COVID-19 patients at the same time, she’s always thinking about her family in the back of her mind while in the units.

“I’m not as worried for myself as I am for my family and friends outside of the hospital, and it’s really, it tends to go to the back of your mind and then all of a sudden it’s right there in the front again because you see it on TV, you see it, you know, in real life,” she said.

The Director of Public Relations tells News13 they just recently moved the COVID-19 isolation units to the first floor so that loved ones can visit family through the windows there.