Closed schools, fewer nurses

Aysha is a nurse practitioner I met during the pandemic who works in a small clinic. It stayed open during the crisis, but her children’s public school did not. So while she worked from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. during the spring semester, her husband, who works a night shift, helped their 7-year-old and 9-year-old with their online schooling—grabbing naps when he could.

When Aysha got home he slept about three hours, then headed off to work, before starting all over in the morning.

Everywhere I look in the hospital, this is what I see: parents, disproportionately women—we make up about 75 percent of health-care workers—who have done brave and difficult things to be able to come to work for the past few months.

Most of us limped through the end of the school year, requesting every emergency favor we had stored up from friends and family to get there. Schools are an important part of the village that helps us raise our kids, along with relatives, babysitters and day care. The pandemic made a substantial part of that village unavailable: schools.

Every parent in this pandemic will tell you that without in-person schools, you can have a job or a child, but ultimately not both. And research shows that women bear the lion’s share of the child-care burden that the pandemic has placed squarely on the home.

I don’t want to open schools without a safe plan. Most of us in medicine had to work without such a plan during the early part of the pandemic, and we wouldn’t wish it on anyone else. But schools are getting short shrift as a national priority. And if female health-care workers don’t come to work, hospitals can’t function.

Remember those months you spent at home, at catastrophic personal and economic cost? (You may still be there.) All of that was to buy time for policymakers and our medical system so that anybody who needed a hospital bed would have one, and so that we could set up a system of testing, tracing and isolation.

That plan failed for multiple reasons. We ended up doing enough so that we have sufficient ventilators (for now) but not enough to guarantee that we could open the economy, and the schools, safely—and now we can’t say for sure if someone will be staffing those hospital beds.

If schools don’t open in the fall, or if some other child care solution isn’t devised, much of the sacrifice of the spring and summer will have been wasted. One consequence is that a large share of our hospital workers will be in an untenable situation, generated by the government’s failure to set the right priorities and to provide leadership.

If female health-care providers are forced to keep juggling tutoring and their jobs, the medical system may not hold. And we need it to hold.