My wife is an ICU physician, so I've been watching this from the sidelines. I can't emphasize enough on how badly COVID broke the system. There's always been

My wife is an ICU physician, so I've been watching this from the sidelines. I can't emphasize enough on how badly COVID broke the system. There's always been problem with staffing and burnout. However, COVID really brought out the worst in people. The patient population became far more abusive than it had in the past and this was during a period where all healthcare providers were working extremely hard, not seeing their families, and sacrificing their personal health to help people. Then, a large part of society decided that COVID wasn't an issue, refused to mask, and refused to vaccinate. At some point, a large portion of providers decided enough was enough and quit: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/workforce/if-1-in-5-healthcare-workers-have-quit-where-have-they-gone.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/workforce/if-1-in-5-he... Now, the problem is that when people started quitting, there were fewer nurses to take care of the patients and their ratios went up. During normal times, a floor nurse might be 6-8 patients to one nurse, a step down unit might be 4-1, and an ICU might be 1-1 or 1-2. It depends on the level of care required. Now, they're doing more than double this on a regular basis. And, frankly, they can't do it, at least safely. There's a number that a nurse can call if they believe they have an unsafe number of patients in order to get some kind of legal protection, but they still have to see that number of patients. And, frankly, it's incredibly stressful because they really, truly can't take care of that many patients, so they quit. A friend of my wife is a nurse trainer at a large hospital. They're having 80% of new nurses quit during their onboarding process because the ratios are absurd. A good portion of my wife's time is spent figuring out who's the least sick patient to discharge from the ICU because they don't have the staff. Unfortunately, I don't think we're even close for this to being over either. The constant refrain is that COVID is the new normal and we need to adjust. I would contend that a new normal would imply a stable operating point and I do not believe this to be the case. It's going to take a really long time to restaff appropriately where the patient ratios and stress level manageable. Long time means years because, really, hospitals want and need BSNs and not just associates level training. In the mean time, every time we have a COVID surge, the hospital gets flooded, everyone gets overworked and abused, and more people quit.