But patients continue to come in droves. In the past four weeks alone, more than 15,000 Covid-19-positive people have been admitted to the city. This is the largest number of hospitalizations since the initial surge. About half of all patients in the city’s hospitals now have Covid-19.
There are simply too many nurses to care for them all. According to the New York State Nurses Association union, hospitals in New York have less nurses than they had at the beginning of the pandemic.
Some nurses are tired of the stress and have quit the profession. Others have taken on traveling nurse jobs for a much higher salary. And the Omicron variant’s extreme infectiousness has meant many are out sick or in isolation on any given day.
Dr. Sylvie de Souza, who runs the Brooklyn Hospital Center’s emergency room, said she had enough doctors but had never had so few nurses. She had three-quarters of all the nurses she needed some days. On Wednesday, it was closer than half.
“During the first wave we were able-bodied,” she said. “But now we’re exhausted and many are ill.”
Dr. de Souza arrived in the morning and left at 11 p.m. Wednesday was her typical schedule during peak Covid-19 times. She helped out wherever she could. At one point, she filled cups with water and passed them out to patients whose lips were cracked and dry.
But the camaraderie that helped sustain hospital workers in early 2020 — when, draped in garbage bags for lack of protective equipment, they faced a deadly new pathogen — sometimes felt as though it had worn thin.
“Please, that vanished pretty quickly,” said Ms. Williams, who was on maternity leave during the first Covid-19 wave and returned to work in June 2020.
Source: NY Times
