“After days off I come back in a panic because I don’t know what to expect”
A New York hospital worker outside a Brooklyn hospital
Source: AP / Kathy Willens
You have been infected with Corona or have to be in quarantine: Many employees are missing in clinics, homes, shops, in transport or among the security forces. In the UK and USA in particular, Omikron is currently causing enormous pressure and stress – and the gaps are growing.
BIn London hospital staff, corona sickness reports tripled this month, with almost a tenth of firefighters in the British capital unable to come to work because of Covid-19. In New York, the pandemic last week kept a large proportion of the police officers off duty – around 2,700 of them were not operational.
Two years after the start of the corona pandemic, the omicron variant of the virus, with its easy transferability and rapid spread, deals another violent blow to the helpers and service providers in the front row. Many clinics, care and security staff, grocery stores or transport workers are already at their limit after months of constant stress.
“Everyone works as much as they can physically and mentally,” says supermarket employee Judy Snarsky in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The 59-year-old currently has 50 hours plus extra work. “Some of us toil like freight trains.”
It is very difficult to be adequately prepared for calls for help from the population, says Mike Solan, head of police in Seattle. Instead of the usual 1,350 people, he currently has only 300 in the force. And nurse Michelle Gonzalez reports from Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx in New York that she and her colleagues in the intensive care unit have not had any real respite since the pandemic began.
Omikron now means enormous pressure and stress again. “I get really bad anxiety before work,” says Gonzalez. “After two days off, I come back in a panic because I don’t know what to expect.”
The gaps tend to get bigger
In some countries, such as the UK and Spain, the quarantine period has already been tightened in order to get employees who have become infected or exposed to the virus back to work more quickly. To alleviate the shortage of personnel, security forces are sometimes called in to help: In the US state of Massachusetts, hundreds of members of the National Guard are on duty in hospitals and nursing homes, serving food, pushing wheelchairs and beds, or doing other non-medical services.
But the gaps are getting bigger. Exhausted and frustrated, nurses turn their backs on their jobs in hospitals. In the three largest clinics in New York alone, 1,500 nursing positions are vacant, as Carl Ginsberg from the local association of nursing staff explains. At the start of the pandemic, it was around half that. “There aren’t enough nurses to do the job,” he complains. “This leads to situations in which the wards work under risky conditions and the patients are in danger.”
Meanwhile, with Omikron, the number of hospital admissions is increasing. In London it doubled in three weeks. “It doesn’t take much for a crisis to break out,” says clinician David Oliver in the south-east of England.
Frustration and exhaustion are also rampant in nursing homes. Because of the age of the residents, the corona outbreaks were often particularly fatal there. “The caregivers are burned out,” says Rachel Reeves, spokeswoman for the AHCA / NCAL care association. “Many have not only suffered enormous losses, but are simply exhausted day in and day out from the fight against the virus – physically and mentally.” Omikron now faces long-term care in the USA with around 15 percent fewer staff than at the beginning of the pandemic.
They all took care of health and care without the luxury of being able to work from home, emphasizes Daniel Schneider from Harvard University, an expert on low-wage work. “Office workers need to appreciate the risks these people are taking,” he says. “You can’t collect groceries from home, you can’t fill shelves from home.”
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