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And if need be, the Mercy may be ordered to shift to treating only patients infected with coronavirus.

That was recently the case for the Norfolk, Va.-based Comfort, the Navy hospital ship that is now in New York City. Its mission is similar, but the Comfort’s crew is working under much different circumstances.

[Read more about the Comfort and its mission in New York.]

New York’s hospitals have been overwhelmed — a fate California leaders have said repeatedly they are working hard to head off, by opening alternate care sites at convention centers and arenas, and by calling upon the Mercy.

Such a mission would most likely be the biggest of the ship’s three-decade-long career.

Normally, the Mercy is tied up at a Navy base in San Diego with a small full-time crew of civilian mariners. Only when it is activated for humanitarian missions does the Navy send a large contingent of active-duty doctors, nurses and other sailors to the ship.

In San Pedro now, the Mercy sits next to the Iowa, another old vessel at the opposite end of the hospital ship’s mission — the former for treating the wounded, and the latter for blasting targets at sea and on land in combat.

The Iowa is a relic — a type of warship this country has not built in more than 70 years, now serving as a floating museum.

Painted haze-gray, it bristles with gun barrels and is armored with thick steel plates.

The Mercy, on the other hand, is a converted oil tanker built in 1976 and recommissioned as a hospital ship in 1986, painted bright white with thick red crosses along its length to show potential enemies that it is protected by the Geneva Convention as a noncombatant ship.