Covid: Health-care workers at a breaking point
“The looming tidal wave of Omicron cases” is about to crash down on health-care workers who are already “in a dark place,” said emergency physician Craig Spencer in The Atlantic.com. For nearly two years, we’ve endured 12-hour shifts in cumbersome protective gear, intubating desperately ill patients and “watching families sob on grainy FaceTime calls while their loved ones slipped away.” Emergency rooms are “overwhelmed and over capacity,” and our usual empathy has been supplanted by physical and emotional exhaustion. Every day, “I hear the desperation of providers who’ve been at the bedside of too many patients that didn’t make it.” We began the pandemic many waves ago by asking citizens to flatten the curve, “but the next curve could truly flatten us.”
Hospitals across the nation are raising the alarm, said Ken Alltucker in USA Today. In Minnesota, where hospital hallways are crowded with Covid patients awaiting empty beds, nine health-system CEOs ran full-page newspaper ads warning that the state’s medical workers are “overwhelmed” and “heartbroken,” and urging citizens to mask, vaccinate, and boost. In Rhode Island, the association representing emergency doctors warned the governor that the health-care system is on the brink of “collapse.” “Traumatized” staffers are leaving in droves, said Maggie Fox in CNN.com. Nearly 1 in 5 health-care workers have quit since the pandemic began, according to a Morning Consult poll. They’re worn down by a “continuing emotional grind, in addition to the physical fatigue,” said Minnesota emergency physician John Hick. Facing surge after surge, “it feels like you are drinking from a firehose.”
Knowing so much of the illness and death we face was avoidable compounds our agony, said emergency physician Rob Davidson in The New York Times. At my overburdened Michigan hospital, “an overwhelming majority” of Covid patients are unvaccinated. Watching them suffer and die is profoundly sad, “but more and more we feel frustrated and angry.” Meanwhile, the highly transmissible Omicron stands to “destabilize our health system” in yet another way, said Peter Hotez in the Los Angeles Times, “by infecting large numbers of health-care providers.” If that happens, we could face a “nightmare scenario” that will affect anyone who needs emergency care: another overwhelming wave of unvaccinated Covid patients cresting “even as the fully vaccinated health-care staff calls out sick.”