Sick staff. Endless COVID patients. Doctors ‘just scraping by’ as omicron sweeps hospitals
On a single day this week, 616 staffers called out sick with COVID-19 at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. Without nearly a tenth of its workers — doctors, nurses, administrators and janitors — the hospital assigned the National Guard to help with an unrelenting swarm of patients, many of them critically ill.
Such scenes around the nation have been brutal as the highly transmissible — if less deadly — omicron variant has set a record of nearly 2 million infection cases each week. That surge has battered health care systems, sapped the morale of doctors and nurses, delayed thousands of surgeries, postponed treatments for life-threatening diseases such as cancer and turned hospitals into around-the-clock triage centers where nerves bristle and anger echoes alongside despair.
The daily grind of rising infections has left virtually no part of America
