Mayor Bill de Blasio has predicted that there could be 1,000 cases in the city by next week, and some doctors are expecting many more. The fundamental question for hospitals is not how many New Yorkers will get sick during the pandemic. It is how many at any given time, and whether the hospitals will have enough beds, workers and ventilators, which the most seriously ill will need to breathe.

There are about 53,000 hospital beds in New York State, including about 3,200 intensive-care unit beds, according to the American Hospital Association. About 20,000 of the beds are in the city, according to Mr. de Blasio. And officials have said there are about 5,000 ventilators in New York City — although many are already being used to keep patients — including stroke victims and others — alive.

The issues facing New York’s hospitals echo the challenges facing health care providers across the country. The World Health Organization says there are fewer hospital beds per capita in the United States than in most other nations, including in Italy and in China, where the coronavirus originated with devastating consequences.

Mr. Cuomo and Mr. de Blasio have repeatedly praised New York’s health care, and the hospitals in the city include storied institutions such as Bellevue Hospital Center, the oldest public hospital in the nation, and a number of top-tier systems. But in recent days, both officials have acknowledged that the outbreak will strain the system in extraordinary ways.

“This is where Italy got into trouble,” Mr. Cuomo said on Friday. “They didn’t have enough I.C.U. beds to handle the number of patients who needed intensive care. That is going to be a problem in this state and in this country. That’s something that we have to watch very, very carefully.”

Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, said that in New York, preparedness plans are based on the experience in 2009 with the H1N1 influenza, which was far less severe an illness.

“I don’t think anyone, anywhere is sufficiently prepared,” Mr. Morse said. “This is something that is really unprecedented in recent history.”

Officials emphasize that most coronavirus cases do not require hospitalization, and that they are trying to slow the spread of the virus through so-called social distancing measures, including closing public spaces, banning large gatherings and asking people to work from home.

Still, around the city and country, hospitals have begun adopting plans for a surge in patients. Some may unfurl large tents as triage centers outside emergency rooms — patients with severe respiratory symptoms would be directed one way, those with broken bones and non-coronavirus symptoms another.

Mark Jarrett, chief quality officer for Northwell Health, which runs 23 hospitals, including Lenox Hill on the Upper East Side, said there was a scramble to find available hospital wings and smaller units. He said he planned to put some coronavirus patients in a wing that had been closed at Glen Cove Hospital on Long Island.

“From my viewpoint, I don’t think anybody knows how many critically ill patients we’re going to have,” Dr. Jarrett said.

Doctors said they were also worried that nursing home patients admitted to hospitals with coronavirus will become long-term patients because nursing homes might be reluctant to accept them back, out of a concern that they are contagious.

About a month ago, Dr. Mitchell Katz, who heads Health and Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system, asked each of its 11 acute-care hospitals to come up with a plan for how to take 100 more patients. That could create space for 1,100 additional patients, though nobody knows whether that will be enough.

Hospitals are also bracing for staffing shortages, because health care workers are bound to get sick or have to stay with children who are ill or home because of school cancellations. The public schools are open in New York City, but many charter, private and religious schools are closed.

The Mount Sinai Health System has started requiring employees to seek preapproval before personal vacations, and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is now urging workers to avoid travel for any reason, according to workers in those systems.

Mount Sinai has also informed specialists in fields like gastroenterology and cardiology that they may be asked to care for coronavirus patients, one worker said.

The Greater New York Hospital Association said it was in talks with a large union about hiring retirees to help with day care for the children of hospital workers. Hospitals are asking the state whether it is necessary to send workers home who may have been exposed to the coronavirus when not wearing proper protection. Sending workers home could limit the risk of contagion but also quickly reduces available staff.

Several systems, including Montefiore Medical Center, are rationing surgical masks and N95 respirators because protective gear is so limited, workers said.

Some hospital executives said they were confident that the outbreak would not overwhelm New York City’s hospitals.

“I believe our health care system can stand up to any challenge,” said Kenneth Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, which represents facilities across the region.

New York authorities have also expressed optimism.

“Wuhan got over it, and they did everything wrong, and New York City will come out of this better, certainly better than Wuhan,” Dr. Katz, of Health and Hospitals, said of the city in China where the coronavirus was first detected.

But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering some grim scenarios, including the possibility that some 2.4 million to 21 million people across the United States could require hospitalization.

Of particular worry is a shortage of ventilators. In New York, a state task force in 2015 released detailed guidelines for deciding who would and would not get one during an influenza pandemic. The guidelines suggest that hospitals focus on providing ventilators to the patients who are most likely to survive with ventilator therapy.

Dr. Katz said he did not think that scenario would come to pass in New York City.

“My assumption is not that we’d be taking patients off ventilators, but that we’d be transferring patients elsewhere,” he said.

Even so, Demetre Daskalakis, deputy commissioner for disease control at the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, recently told an audience of doctors and medical students to prepare for the possibility they might soon be making decisions about who receives lifesaving care, and who does not.

“If things get crazier, you have to think about triaging the use of I.C.U. beds and ventilators,” said Dr. Daskalakis, speaking at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in Manhattan about the coronavirus. “Really deciding who needs them and who doesn’t, and making some very serious difficult decisions.”

Anjali Tsui contributed reporting.

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