It is one thing to get enough ventilators — it is quite another to have enough dedicated staff trained to run the life-saving breathing machines.
That’s why respiratory therapists like eight-months-pregnant Jennifer Cubero and her husband Bryan Zabala are the unsung heroes in the city’s battle against the coronavirus. 
“Given the circumstances, it’s crazier than usual for us. So then, being pregnant, it’s a challenge — we are running over 120 vents,” Cubero, a 31-year-old respiratory therapist at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn‘s Borough Park neighborhood, told The Post. 
Zabala does the same job at nearby NYU Langone-Brooklyn in Sunset Park and their expertise in the respiratory system has never been more critical as doctors struggle to keep patients stricken with COVID-19 alive on ventilators. The machines help patients breathe when their lungs are failing, which is a hallmark of the oft-deadly bug. 
“I spent two years living and breathing respiratory so I’m specialized in these machines,” Zabala, 31, told The Post. 

“We understand the physiology of their lungs and how we can manipulate the vents to help kind of correct their numbers as best as we can while keeping the patient comfortable. Some people can get a little aggressive and be like, ‘Oh, no, you just turn this and that’ and it doesn’t work,” Cubero said. 
The couple have 1- and 3-year-old children at home, and since both see only the most critical of patients coming off shift is also stressful, knowing they have a high risk of getting infected and bringing the virus to their Borough Park home.

“This virus is vicious, when it hits it’s like a sledgehammer,” he said. 
“We have lost some patients and it’s frustrating because we’re working our hardest here to try to keep them alive … there’s only so much we can actually do.” 
Zabala and Cubero are two out of 7,713 licensed respiratory therapists in all of New York state right now, which has more than 2,000 patients on ventilators, but those numbers are dwindling as more and more hospital workers get sick from treating patients. 
“Unfortunately there aren’t enough respiratory therapists in hospitals right now. We need a lot more,” Zabala said. 
“We are the ones who are dealing with all these COVID patients and unfortunately, we are at a high risk of getting infected, so a couple of us have gotten infected,” he added. 
“We’re going down.” 
On a good day, NYU Langone-Brooklyn has seven or eight respiratory therapists but last Friday, he said they were down to six. 

Do you have a nominee for The Post’s Hero of the Day? Email heroes@nypost.com.