NY TIMES FRONT PAGE: Doctors, Nurses ‘Living in a Constant Crisis’ as Virus Fills Hospitals

NEW YORK TIMES: On the top floor of the hospital, in the unit that houses the sickest Covid-19 patients, 13 of the 14 beds were occupied. In the one empty room, a person had just died.

Through surge after surge, caregivers in the unit at Covenant HealthCare in Saginaw, Mich., have helped ailing patients say goodbye to their relatives on video calls.

The medical workers have cried in the dimly lit hallways. They have seen caseloads wane, only to watch beds fill up again. Mostly, they have learned to fear the worst.

“You come back to work and you ask who died,” said Bridget Klingenberg, an intensive care nurse at Covenant, where staff levels are so strained that the Defense Department recently sent reinforcements.

“I don’t think people understand the toll that that takes unless you’ve actually done it.”

The highly contagious Omicron variant arrives in the United States at a moment when there is little capacity left in hospitals, especially in the Midwest and Northeast, where case rates are the highest, and where many health care workers are still contending with the Delta variant.

Some researchers are hopeful that Omicron may cause less severe disease than Delta, but health officials still worry that the new variant could send a medical system already under pressure to the breaking point.

About 1,300 Americans are dying from the coronavirus each day.

The national case, death and hospitalization rates remain well below those seen last winter, before vaccines were widely available.

But suddenly, positive tests are growing. State officials in New York reported more than 20,000 coronavirus cases on Friday, which they said was more than on any other day of the pandemic.

In Connecticut and Maine, reports of new infections have grown by around 150 percent in the last two weeks.

In Ohio and Indiana, hospitalization rates are approaching those seen during last winter’s devastating wave.... 

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/us/covid-hospitals-omicron.html