[Chief Pagan]

Cyndy O’Brien, an emergency room nurse at Ocean Springs Hospital on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, could not believe her eyes as she arrived for work. There were people sprawled out in their cars gasping for air as three ambulances with gravely ill patients idled in the parking lot. Just inside the front doors, a crush of anxious people jostled to get the attention of an overwhelmed triage nurse.

“It’s like a war zone,” said Ms. O’Brien, who is the patient care coordinator at Singing River, a small health system near the Alabama border that includes Ocean Springs. “We are just barraged with patients and have nowhere to put them.”

The bottleneck, however, has little to do with a lack of space. Nearly 30 percent of Singing River’s 500 beds are empty. With 169 unfilled nursing positions, administrators must keep the beds empty.

Nursing shortages have long vexed hospitals. But in the year and a half since its ferocious debut in the United States, the coronavirus pandemic has stretched the nation’s nurses as never before, testing their skills and stamina as desperately ill patients with a poorly understood malady flooded emergency rooms. They remained steadfast amid a calamitous shortage of personal protective equipment; spurred by a sense of duty, they flocked from across the country to the newest hot zones, sometimes working as volunteers. More than 1,200 of them have died from the virus.

The staffing shortages have a hospital-wide domino effect. When hospitals lack nurses to treat those who need less intensive care, emergency rooms and I.C.U.s are unable to move out patients, creating a traffic jam that limits their ability to admit new ones. One in five I.C.U.s are at least 95 percent capacity, according to an analysis by The New York Times, a level experts say makes it difficult to maintain standards of care for the very sick.

Oregon’s governor has ordered 1,500 National Guard troops to help tapped-out hospital staff. Officials in a Florida county where hospitals are over capacity are urging residents “to consider other options” before calling 911. And a Houston man with six gunshot wounds had to wait a week before Harris Health, one of the country’s largest hospital systems, could fit him in for surgery to repair a shattered shoulder.

“If it’s a broken ankle that needs a pin, it’s going to have to wait. Our nurses are working so hard, but they can only do so much,” said Maureen Padilla, who oversees nursing at Harris Health. The system has 400 openings for bedside nurses, including 17 that became vacant in the last three weeks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/h...age-delta.html