“At first they were short of personal protective equipment, then they were short of ventilators, and now they are short of medical staff.”
At a time when the Omicron virus strain is raging across the United States and the number of newly diagnosed cases has reached 600,000, the US “Washington Post” issued an article on the 30th reflecting that in this two-year-long battle against the new crown epidemic, ” We are in short supply from start to finish.” Now, under the impact of the new strain of Omicron, the vast number of medical staff is becoming exhausted, and the US medical system is facing a severe labor shortage.
The Washington Post reported that Craig Daniels (Craig Daniels), a critical care doctor at the world’s top hospital Mayo Clinic (Mayo Clinic) for two decades, said in an interview, “People used to have a kind of Hypothetically, two years after the outbreak, the health sector should have hired more people.” However, such a thing did not happen.
“The reality is we’ve reached the limit … the people who draw blood, the people who work the night shift, the people who sit in the room with the mentally ill. They’re all tired. We’re all tired.”
The report pointed out that what this elite medical institution has encountered is a common situation in hospitals across the United States, with medical staff feeling exhausted, running out of fuel, and furious at patients who refuse to wear masks and get vaccinated. The situation worsened after the Omicron strain began hitting the U.S., with hospital labor shortages becoming an increasing problem.
“In past outbreaks, we’ve seen shortages of ventilators, hemodialysis machines, and shortages of ICU wards,” said Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Now with Omicron coming, what we’re really short on is the health care workers themselves.”
The British “Guardian” reported that as early as April this year, a survey report showed that 55% of front-line medical staff in the United States felt exhausted, and they often faced harassment or frustration at work. The American Nurses Association is also trying to urge U.S. officials to declare the nurse shortage a national crisis
According to the US Consumer News and Business Channel (CNBC), from February 2020 to November this year, the US health care industry lost a total of 450,000 workers, mostly nurses and home care workers, according to the country’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In response to the crisis of medical care shortages, health care systems across the United States have begun to take action.
The Washington Post said they began rejecting requests for emergency medical services, discouraging employees from taking sick days off, and several states dispatched the National Guard to help stressed hospitals with simple tasks, such as helping deliver food, cleaning room etc.
“Starting today, our state’s only Level 1 trauma hospital will be performing emergency surgery only to preserve some capacity to provide high-quality care,” said emergency physician Megan Ranney of Brown University in Rhode Island. There are critically ill patients.”
She believes that the “absence” of the hospital is completely bad news for all kinds of patients. “The next few weeks will be terrible for patients and their families.”
The strategy given by the CDC is to relax the epidemic prevention requirements for health care workers, allowing hospitals to immediately recall infected or close contact staff who are not showing symptoms if necessary.
Previously, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even reduced the recommended quarantine time for people who tested positive for the new crown from 10 days to 5 days. If the close contacts have been fully vaccinated and are within the protection period, they do not even need to be quarantined. Dr. Fauci, an American medical and health expert, said that shortening the recommended isolation period is to allow these infected people to return to work as soon as possible to ensure the normal functioning of society.
However, while the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relaxed its epidemic prevention policy to ensure sufficient medical staff and the normal operation of society, the agency also gave a cruel prediction on the 29th that in the next four weeks, more than 44,000 people in the United States may die of new coronary pneumonia.
According to statistics from Johns Hopkins University in the United States, as of 6:22 on December 31, 2021 Beijing time, the cumulative number of confirmed cases of new coronary pneumonia in the United States exceeded 54.21 million, reaching 54,215,085; the cumulative number of deaths exceeded 820,000, reaching 824,135 example. A record 618,094 new cases were confirmed in a single day, similar to the 647,061 cases recorded by Bloomberg.
Post time: Jan-19-2022
