COVID-19 is again hitting nurses, flight crews and other frontline staff. «We don’t have enough hands,» one grocery worker says.
With the latest wave upending another holiday season, frontline employees are feeling a disturbing sense of deja vu. The soaring number of U.S. infections linked to the has only deepened the crisis among essential workers, many of whom report being demoralized, abused, underpaid and exhausted as the pandemic trudges into its second year. As 2021 comes to a close, workers in health care, transportation, retail, food services and other key sectors are again falling prey to COVID-19, leaving already diminished workforces to pick up the slack. The shortages are leading to, closed eateries and short-staffed retail stores. Above all, workers speak of a renewed sense of fatigue and frustration. «We don’t have enough hands. Everybody is working as much as they physically and mentally can,» Judy Snarsky, a grocery worker in Massachusetts, told the Associated Press. «Some of us have been going like a freight train.» The supermarket where she works on Cape Cod is down to about 100 workers from its normal level of 150, and Snarsky has been working 50 hours a week while picking up extra tasks due to understaffing, the 59-year-old said. At CityMD, rising COVID-19 cases among staff has pushed the New York-area chain of private urgent-care clinics to close 1 in 10 locations this week. New York City’s public hospital system has made nearly all clinic visits this week virtual in order to free up nurses for hospitals and testing sites, Gothamist reported. «I am concerned about a loss of staff due to Omicron,» said Mitchell Katz, the hospital system’s CEO. Michelle Gonzalez, a nurse at New York’s Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, said that she and her intensive care unit colleagues never truly had a break from COVID-19, while the arrival of Omicron has only intensified the stress. «Prior to work, I get really bad anxiety,» she said. «If I’ve been off for two days, I will come back in a panic because I don’t know what I’m walking into.» At least seven states in the Midwest and Northeast have called in hundreds of National Guard members to help fill labor gaps in hospitals and nursing homes, where they serve meals, transport patients and perform other nonclinical work. Unions representing health care workers gripe that far too many hospitals failed to fill staff vacancies or to retain pandemic-weary staff. For example, there are 1,500 nursing vacancies in New York’s three largest hospitals alone — about double the number at the onset of the pandemic, said Carl Ginsberg, a spokesman for the 42,000-member New York State Nurses Association.
