Educators preparing healthcare workers amid COVID-19 threat.

Shirley Bannister received the call at 6 a.m.

Bannister, nursing department chair at Midlands Technical College, answered the phone to find a former student on the line and in a panic.

"Her plight was, 'I have no mask,' " Bannister said. " 'I'm in the trenches, and I have no mask.' We got together and found some things to give to her to help her through that weekend. But I've heard from one or two students about how difficult it really is."

Bannister is one of several area education professionals working to prepare soon-to-be nurses and healthcare workers in related fields amid the uncertainty of COVID-19.

As National Nurses Day, observed today, kicks off National Nurses Week, the numbers are sobering. As of May 4, 67,456 people in the U.S. had died of COVID-19, with the country reporting 1,152,372 cases, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

South Carolina had 6,757 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 283 deaths, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control. Richland County has been particularly hard-hit, with 977 confirmed and 6,007 estimated cases. Those are the highest numbers in the state, which has a total of 41,507 suspected cases.

DHEC estimates the number of confirmed cases in S.C. to grow to 9,652 by May 23, a projection of almost 1,000 new cases a week.

Adrian Stauffer, director of nursing at ECPI University in Columbia and a nurse for 15 years, has wrestled with her eight-year role as an educator while former students, including her daughter, battle the pandemic closer to the front lines.

"They're faced with a lot of the realities that we're seeing in the media," Stauffer said. "For us (educators), it's kind of like, do we go out into the field? Are we most useful being out there? But we have to remind ourselves that we have to be here for the students, because we're being much more effective as instructors and helping prepare those students so that they can get out in the field."

Stauffer, whose daughter works in a correctional facility in Arizona, and other healthcare educators had to shift their instructional model as the coronavirus closed campuses throughout the state. Experience usually obtained through hands-on hospital work morphed into clickable classes in online and virtual coursework as national standards adjusted to allow a higher percentage of clinical simulation.

"We had to move all online for classroom experiences, and we had to resort to virtual simulations to enhance the clinical learning that we would ordinarily have," said Jeannette Andrews, dean of the University of South Carolina's College of Nursing. "The state...

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