Exhausted nurses in rural Yuma, Arizona, regularly send Covid-19 patients on a long helicopter ride to Phoenix when they don’t have enough staff. The so-called winter lettuce capital of the US has also lagged on coronavirus testing in heavily Hispanic neighbourhoods and just ran out of vaccines, AP reports.

But some support is coming from military nurses and a new wave of free tests for farmworkers and the elderly in Yuma County — the hardest-hit county in one of the hardest-hit states. Forty army reserve nurses arrived this month to help at the Yuma hospital for at least a month through a Department of Defence Covid-19 support operation in hard-hit parts of the US West and Midwest.

They are among several hundred military medical personnel dispatched since November to work alongside civilian health care providers treating Covid-19 patients on the Navajo Nation and in six states including Arizona and New Mexico.