As the total number of coronavirus cases in California topped 16,000, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday he is confident the state is building up its number of ventilators, hospital beds and workforce to meet the demand of a still-to-come surge in patients that he projects won’t peak until May.

Newsom is so confident, in fact, that he announced the state was donating 500 ventilators to the Strategic National Stockpile to deploy in states that need them more, like New York, which has already received ventilators from Oregon, Washington and from China.

The Mercury News story reports that as of Monday evening, California had recorded 16,309 positive COVID-19 tests – a 46% increase since Friday, and 387 deaths, according to data compiled by this news organization.

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation now anticipates that California will reach its peak use of resources – total beds, ICU beds and ventilators – on April 14. That’s almost two weeks earlier than what it forecast a week ago, based on a larger sampling of data and lower ratios of hospital admissions to deaths.

The good news: Given the state’s current resources, that model predicts that California will have a surplus of all the necessary resources to meet the surge in coronavirus patients.

Newsom and his team of health professionals repeated on Monday they are still preparing for the state to reach its capacity of permanent hospital beds – 50,000 – in mid-May.

John E. Swartzberg, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of California Berkeley, said his “best guess” was that the Bay Area will see peaks in hospital patients in about two and a half weeks – or toward the end of April. But he admitted, no one can be certain.

During a news conference on Monday, Newsom said that the number of people hospitalized due to coronavirus had increased 4.9% overnight to 2,509 and the number of patients in ICU beds has increased by 4.3% to 1,085.

But so far, the state has room for more. There are 7,345 ICU beds in California, of which 1,498 are in the Bay Area, according to a recent analysis by Kaiser Health News.

Newsom has declared a goal of identifying 50,000 additional hospital beds to complement the 70,000 licensed beds that already exist. The state has asked hospitals to identify 30,000 beds that could be repurposed to serve a surge in COVID-19 patients and is working with partners to find another 20,000.

And the rush to add more medical equipment to face a surge is continuing. The state has increased its number of ventilators from about 7,600 to more than 11,000 in recent weeks. It has also secured 4,316 additional hospital beds – a fourth of the overall goal – by transforming the Kings’ former arena and the Santa Clara Convention Center into temporary medical facilities for acute patients and taking over Seton Hospital in Daly City.