Burned out by the pandemic, 3 in 10 health-care workers consider leaving the profession
After a year of trauma, doctors, nurses and other health workers are struggling to cope
...According to a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll, roughly 3 in 10 health-care workers have weighed leaving their profession. More than half are burned out. And about 6 in 10 say stress from the pandemic has harmed their mental health.
In wrenching interviews, nurses, doctors, technicians — and even administrative staff and dental hygienists who haven’t directly treated covid-19 patients — explained the impulse to quit and the emotional wreckage the pandemic has left in their lives.
It’s not just the danger they’ve endured, they say. Many talked about the betrayal and hypocrisy they feel from the public they have sacrificed so much to save — their clapping and hero-worship one day, then refusal to wear masks and take basic precautions the next, even if it would spare health workers the trauma of losing yet another patient….
We’re approaching 600,000 deaths in this country, never mind countless people left suffering long term affects of the virus. Variants combined with refusal to wear masks or get vaccinated are causing case numbers to spike again, including in my state. Here, hospitalizations are at the highest since mid — February, including at the hospital where my Critical Care RN son works.
COVID-19 hospitalizations surge across Maine, hit record levels at Lewiston’s CMMC
Inpatients are younger and from rural areas, and the virus variant from U.K. may be part of the reason.
...The new surge – which comes even as a majority of adult Mainers have received at least one vaccine shot – is different in that many of the patients needing inpatient care are younger than 60 and most are from rural areas. In the past, few infected people under 60 became so sick they needed to be admitted to a hospital.
“Those who are getting sick are younger and the ones getting hospitalized are mostly in their 40s and 50s, and whereas in January they were primarily from urban areas now they’re almost all from rural Maine,” said Dr. Dora Anne Mills, chief health improvement officer at MaineHealth, the state’s largest hospital network. “It’s a different type of pandemic right now.”
That is probably literally the case. A more contagious and virulent form of the coronavirus, the B.1.1.7 variant first detected in the United Kingdom, was found in Maine in early February and is now the dominant strain in the United States. It appears to more readily transmit between young people but is not resistant to vaccines.
All of the COVID-19 inpatients recently admitted to Maine Medical Center in Portland, the state’s largest hospital, were unvaccinated, Mills said, but their average age was 49, down from 75 last spring….
None of it had to be like this. It was made this way by political opportunism and willful ignorance.
I'm past tired of this country and everything we love being held hostage. I'm done with giving a damn about people who Shakespeare described so accurately centuries ago.
... : But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.
In modern language:
But give a proud man a little bit of temporary authority and he forgets what it means to be made in God’s image. Instead, like an angry ape that mimics people’s behavior, he does such incredibly grotesque things before high heaven that the angels, if they were human, would either weep or die laughing.....
I’m beyond done with a media that has persisted in treating science denying, insurrectionist supporting people as if they were just normal folks and not a profound threat to everything we hold dear.