BROCKTON — When she was assigned to a New York City hospital as a travel nurse late last year, Alycia Daley never imagined she’d find herself in the epicenter of a global pandemic ravaging hospitals around the world.

But as health care centers in the city became overwhelmed with coronavirus patients, Daley said it got so bad the staff were worried for their own safety as they watched colleagues get sick. She even assigned one of her coworkers as her health care proxy in the event she tested positive and took a turn for the worse.

“I never thought I’d be doing that at 30,” she said.

Now back in Brockton after cases in New York City have declined and taking time off before she volunteers to go help other hospitals seeing an uptick in cases, Daley described what she witnessed as “horrific” and expressed fear that a second wave of the coronavirus could cause a spiral in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the country.

“Some people feel like the news is hyping it up, but I say, being in New York, it was way worse than what they were releasing,” she said. “When it hits, and it hits bad, people around you get sick who have taken precautions -- they know what to do.”

Daley first landed in New York in October through her company, Aya Healthcare, that sends nurses on temporary placements around the world where short-term staff is needed. As an oncology RN, she was assigned to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center helping long-term cancer patients.

She was only supposed to stay for about three months, she said, but once the hospital caught wind of the news about the emergence of the coronavirus in China, they extended her contract. During the first few months she was there, Daley said she would travel back to Brockton once a month when she had a few days off in a row to work per diem at Good Samaritan Medical Center.

Upon returning to New York the week of March 20, she saw coronavirus cases explode in the city, not knowing then that her previous trip to Brockton would be the last time she would return home for months.

“When I went back (to New York), that’s when it really hit,” she said. “That’s when they declared it was a pandemic and the state of emergency for everyone to shelter in place. It was like every day, it was changing.”

It was then that she entered “survival mode,” she said, where every day seemed to see another floor of COVID-19 patients as New York City turned into a “ghost town.”

“At one point, we had almost 16 floors and four ICUs, just COVID-19,” she said. ”... All of the hospitals kind of came together at one point. We were sharing supplies and sharing patients just because patients were dying in the emergency room before they even got seen. It was just too many people that were sick.”

Given the novelty of the virus and uncertainty about how it worked, Daley said they were learning more about the symptoms of the virus and how it spread through staff that got sick, who reported a loss of a sense of smell, months before it was identified as a symptom.

“A lot of patients and people that got it didn’t have a sore throat,” she said. “They had chest pain, chest tightness. That’s when we found out people were asymptomatic. We were testing patients every 72 hours and they were testing negative, and then all of a sudden testing positive.”

And while she said she saw a lot of older patients respond well to treatment in the beginning, she also saw younger patients under the age of 50 with no preexisting conditions get extremely sick.

“People were coming in normal and walking fine, and then ending up on ventilators in a matter of hours,” she said. “It was scary, because you didn’t know why it was happening, especially back then.”

The unknowns of the virus sparked fear in the hospital staff, with Daley saying she was afraid to leave her apartment except to go to work and do essential errands like grocery shopping.

“You’re scared and nervous of yourself catching it,” she said. ”...We were just scared but trying to do the best we could and remain safe.”

Shortly after celebrating her 31st birthday in New York on May 20, where she worked a 13 1/2 hour shift, the number of cases declined enough -- down to one floor for COVID-19 patients and one ICU -- for her to return to Brockton.

She tested negative for both the virus and antibodies upon her return, but her experience has led her to take a break before she plans to use her experience with coronavirus cases to help other hospitals with a surge of cases starting in August.

“That’s why I’m taking the two months off and I am talking to a counselor, just about the PTSD because I was having nightmares when I first came back,” she said. “It’s scary. It’s really scary. It’s nothing you could imagine. Being in New York during that time, it’s really something I feel like you had to be there.”

After her experience, Daley stressed the importance of wearing masks, washing hands and sanitizing frequently, maintaining social distancing and limiting contact with other people to make contact tracing easier in the event of a positive test result -- mainly acting as if you were infectious around your loved ones, she said.

“We showed in New York that you can make the numbers go down if you do this stuff,” she said. “It works. I saw the floors get less full, I saw that it was true -- we were having less people who were sick, less people with symptoms, less people on ventilators.”

And even if people don’t believe that wearing masks or other suggested methods to prevent transmission of the virus work, she asked: What could it hurt if it makes someone feel better, especially with the potential to save even one life?

“The more time passes, the more we can learn,” she said. ”... I feel like we will eventually find a treatment for it, but the longer we have, the better. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but just remain diligent and that’s what I would tell my neighbors and loved ones and I would tell other people. Because it works -- it’s been proven.”