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Surgeons are no strangers to mass casualty incidents. Although the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic may not involve many trips to the operating room, the lessons learned in organizational management of prior natural disasters, mass shootings, and transportation incidents are valuable. At our institution, more than a quarter of patients who initially present with COVID-19 have been intubated, requiring multiple, time-consuming bedside procedures for hemodynamic monitoring and central venous access. As the hospital architecture has changed to suit the demands of the coronavirus pandemic, its workforce has also needed to evolve.In response, the surgical residency has created a special team, the surgical workforce activation team (SWAT), to help offload procedural work from the other emergency medicine, critical care, and medicine departments. The mission of the SWAT is to build and deploy a specialized team of clinicians with the skill set to efficiently perform bedside procedures in an effort to support our colleagues, reduce health care personnel exposure, preserve personal protective equipment, and provide quality care to patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have performed common, time-consuming procedures, including setting up central catheters, arterial catheters, and dialysis catheters, thereby alleviating the workflow of intensive care unit (ICU) teams.

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