Thread by @CMichaelGibson

Many have become numb to pandemic statistics

Healthcare workers, though, must face the reality that there are now MORE PATIENTS HOSPITALIZED THAN AT ANY TIME in 2020, 40% more than 2 weeks ago

Some are working 36 hrs straight

The 3rd wave may break us

theatlantic.com/health/archive…

"They require twice as much attention as a typical intensive-care unit patient, for three times the normal length of stay. “It was doable over the summer, but now it’s just too much,”

“Last Monday we had 25 patients waiting in the emergency department. They had been admitted but there was no one to take care of them.” I asked her how much slack the system has left. “There is none,” she said.

The entire state of Iowa is now out of staffed beds. Worse is coming. Iowa is accumulating more than 3,600 confirmed cases every day; relative to its population, that’s more than twice the rate Arizona experienced during its summer peak, “when their system was near collapse,”

Smaller clinics, nursing homes, and long-term-care facilities are still struggling to provide personal protective equipment, including gloves and masks. “About a third are completely out of at least one type of PPE”

"They’ll have several tubes going into their heart and blood vessels, administering eight to 12 drugs—sedatives, pain medications, blood thinners, antibiotics, and more. All of these must be carefully adjusted, sometimes minute to minute, by an ICU nurse just to keep them alive,”

"No one has reinforcements to send. There are travel nurses who aren’t tied to specific health systems, but the hardest-hit rural hospitals are struggling to attract them away from wealthier, urban centers. “people don’t want to work in Fargo, North Dakota, for the holidays,”

"nurses who are positive for COVID-19 but symptom-free can return to work in COVID-19 units. “That’s just a big red flag of just how serious it is,” Suttle says. (The North Dakota Nurses Association has rejected the policy.)"

“to protect yourself, you just shut down. You get to the point when you realize that you’ve become a machine. There’s only so many bags you can zip.”

"As the pandemic moved out of big cities & into rural towns, health-care workers were more likely to treat people they knew personally—relatives, hospital colleagues, the bus driver who drove their kids to school. The lines between our personal lives and our careers are gone,”

"After SARS hit Toronto in 2003, health-care workers at hospitals that treated SARS patients showed higher levels of burnout & PTSD up to two years later, compared with those at hospitals in nearby cities that didn’t see the disease. That outbreak lasted just four months."