Updated April 10, 2020 18:35:19

Photo: Australian nurse Yanti Turang says young people are among those dying in New Orleans. (Supplied: William Widmer)

An Australian emergency nurse working in one of the United States' coronavirus hotspots is urging Australians to continue to adhere to social-distancing measures to avoid the horrors she is witnessing in the US.

Yanti Turang is originally from Kyneton in central Victoria and has experience in pandemics after working in Sierra Leone during an Ebola outbreak.

Now she is on the frontline of another medical crisis, working in a hospital emergency department in New Orleans.

There have been more than 650 deaths in Louisiana and she has implored Australians to take the pandemic seriously.

"I think every single Australian needs to realise that this disease, it doesn't see borders, doesn't see race, doesn't see gender, it doesn't see class. And it could happen to anyone,'' she said.

"I've been taking care of patients who are in their late 20s and they've died," she said.

"And patients, elderly patients, patients my parents' age that haven't made it, patients that are my age that haven't made it."

Photo: The temporary hospital in a New Orleans convention centre has 1,000 beds and can double that capacity if needed. (AP: Gerald Herbert)

Ms Turang is now the deputy of a new 1,000 bed hospital set up in less than a week by the US National Guard to look after recovering patients, so beds can be made available for more acute patients.

She said a particularly terrifying aspect of the disease was that when patients needed to be intubated — a tube put down their throat to help them breathe — they were still conscious and talking.

"Most of the time it's from a trauma or an accident that has caused them to usually be unconscious, and we have to take over the breathing, but what's been scary with COVID is that the patients are talking to you,'' she said.

Breaking down the latest news and research to understand how the world is living through an epidemic, this is the ABC's Coronacast podcast.

She said she often offered to call a family member over FaceTime for patients before they were intubated.

"[It] is a strange kind of interaction to have before you intubate someone and you're not really sure if they're going to make it. It is hard."

And she has a message for any Australians who might be apathetic about the threat posed by COVID-19.

"Australia, you don't want to be here, like where we are in the United States. It's terrifying. Other states are preparing if they can, but the numbers will keep climbing and we're going to lose a lot of people here."

'No, you can't relax,' warns New York's Governor

Elsewhere in the US, New York continued to be hit hard by the pandemic, with the state posting a record-breaking increase in coronavirus deaths for a third consecutive day on Thursday, even as a surge of patients in overwhelmed hospitals slowed.

The number of deaths in the state of New York rose by 799 to more than 7,000, after increases of 779 the day before, and 731 the day before that.

The world is no longer measuring the worst-case scenario against Wuhan. Now America — a nation used to being a global leader — has been brought to its knees, writes David Lipson.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo described Thursday's death count as a lagging indicator, reflecting the loss of people who had become sick earlier in the outbreak.

But the snapshot of hospitalisations showed a less dire picture.

A net 200-patient increase in hospitalisations was "the lowest number we've had since this nightmare started", Mr Cuomo said, compared with daily increases of more than 1,000 last week.

"It is good news. 'Well, now I can relax,' No, you can't relax," Mr Cuomo cautioned.

Australia's infection rate slows

Meanwhile, Australia could be "on the cusp" of slowing the infections of coronavirus to the point that the epidemic "dies out", Australia's Deputy Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly has said.

Professor Kelly said the number of people infected by one person with COVID-19 was a key component in understanding how it spreads.

"Ideally where you want to be is below one, so less than one other person being infected after a person themselves had the infection," he said.

"And once you get to that point, the virus dies out, or the epidemic dies out. And so at the moment we're probably on the cusp of that in Australia."

But he stressed that such an outcome remained dependent on Australians continuing to follow the physical-distancing directives in place.

"This is not time for us to be changing the rules in terms of social distancing and the other things we've done in society over recent weeks," he said.

Infographic: Growth in known cases in key countries, on a logarithmic scale

This chart uses a logarithmic scale to highlight coronavirus growth rates. Read our explainer to understand what that means — and what we can learn from countries that have slowed the spread.

Topics: covid-19, epidemics-and-pandemics, diseases-and-disorders, health, doctors-and-medical-professionals, medical-specialisation, ebola, melbourne-3000, united-states, australia, vic, kyneton-3444

First posted April 10, 2020 16:49:48