Via The Guardian: US hospitals struggle with staffing shortages and Omicron outbreaks. Excerpt:
On her fourth day of Covid symptoms, Ruth woke up in the worst pain of her life. It felt like her joints were filled with broken glass; she couldn’t walk, couldn’t move. “It was worse than childbirth,” she said.
When friends texted to check on her, she couldn’t hold the phone or move her fingers to write back. Her doctor called in medication, and it took Ruth 40 minutes to shuffle to the pharmacy half a block away.
Ruth – who did not want her full name used – is certain that if she weren’t vaccinated and boosted, she would be in the intensive care unit or worse right now. But while she’s recovering from this “mild” case, she’s unable to work even as cases surge in her region.
Ruth is an emergency nurse in Washington DC. Her case of breakthrough Covid shows what may happen when the more contagious variant hits health workers all over the country – and the pressures Omicron will put on a US health system already groaning under the weight of the pandemic. In this wave, it’s not a shortage of beds but a shortage of qualified workers to care for people in those beds that is raising alarm bells.
“What do you do when you have a tidal wave coming at you in a little paddle boat?” Ruth asked. “There’s going to be a huge uptick. Our entire waiting room is going to be all Covid-positive.”
In Washington DC the infection curve looks like a straight line up. On Saturday, the city nearly tripled its previous record-high number of cases. At least two of Ruth’s colleagues were already out sick with Covid.
In a matter of weeks, Omicron has become the dominant variant in the United States. It accounts for 73% of sequenced cases, six times higher than last week. As the holidays approach, officials and experts warn of an unmanageable crush of patients and potentially catastrophic staffing shortages.
“This is a big concern,” said Marcus Plescia, the chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “This is a highly contagious variant, and we really think it could cause significant issues with the workforce.”
Omicron is spreading like wildfire and slamming into hospitals, and “there’s no question that this is going to be on us, really in the next week or so”, Plescia said.
Others agreed. “There’s no question” that Omicron outbreaks among healthcare workers are “significantly diminishing the workforce”, said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “It has profound implications for our ability to not just take care of people with Covid but [also] the other diseases that are out there.”
The American Nurses Association is urging US officials to declare the nursing shortage a national crisis, and the American College of Emergency Physicians has expressed concerns the shortage will affect patient care.
