NEW YORK — “The Surge at Mount Sinai” is a new documentary directed by Jonny Kapps. It chronicles the spring of 2020, when health care workers inside Mt. Sinai's Morningside campus raced against time as the number of COVID infections increased. Kapps captured behind the scenes moments with doctors, nurses and patients.

“I like to work, I love my job. I love to work long hours and very hard,” says Kapps. “But seeing these folks and the healthcare workers in their environment, it kind of blew me away.”

Jessica Montanaro is an ICU Nurse at Mount Sinai. She is one of many workers highlighted in the film.

“It was so fast, and there were so many patients we couldn't keep up,” says Montanaro. “It really was important to us to be there for these patients.”

That included being there for fellow ER nurse Mohammad Khansa, who was hospitalized himself after contracting the virus.

“When I heard he was in our unit I felt heartbroken because I just knew what he had been seeing, what we were seeing, and I couldn't imagine what he was worried about,” says Montanaro.

“Every time somebody come in to visit me I want to kick them out, get them away, because I was afraid that something's gonna happen to them,” says Khansa. “She comes in and she holds my hand and she got close to me, tells me 'I'm here for you. I'm not afraid of this.' What do you call that? I don't call that a profession. I don't call that a job. This cannot be. It's like it's so demeaning to the action. It's just love.”

The bond between the two nurses is one likely to last a lifetime. Khansa said he owes Montanaro a lot.

“I know she did that with multiple of patients,” he says. “She came in and she gave me a hug, and and there is no word for that except love and humanity in the ultimate form.”

Montanaro remembers the early days during the surge.

“It was pretty ugly, I'll be honest with you," she says. "I had a nurse at the end of the shift who had multiple people die that day on her and she looked at me and said, 'I can't put another patient in a body bag today.' The physical exhaustion, the emotional exhaustion, the sadness - we're still feeling it.”

Montanaro warns that the pandemic is not over and offers her advice: “Get vaccinated. Please get vaccinated. That's number one. We are having a lull and we had a lull last summer, and then we went to round two. Now there's a different variant out there and anything can happen. So get vaccinated, enjoy life, enjoy the lull, but be responsible about it. Round three is going to be super tough on the healthcare system as a whole, on New Yorkers, on nurses, and doctors. Get vaccinated.”

"The Surge At Mount Sinai" is streaming now on Discovery+.