NEW YORK TIMES: Just 2 Nurses For 36 Patients - This Is What The Omicron Wave Looks Like At One Brooklyn E.R.

BROOKLYN: A young man poked his head out of an isolation room and demanded, not for the first time, to know the Covid-19 test result he was waiting for. He kept asking until Natasha Williams looked up.

At that moment, Ms. Williams was one of only two nurses working on the Covid-19 ward, with its 36 patients. The young man was the healthiest in sight.

One of the patients might die before the day was done, she worried. A few were on ventilators. One was curled in a fetal position and moaning for water; another was asking to eat. Patients were crammed into every corner, their gurneys arranged, Ms. Williams thought, like blocks in a game of Tetris.

“We’re all busy,” she called out to the young man, calmly but with a hint of irritation. “We’re not here twiddling our thumbs. You’re going to have to be patient.”

The nature of the Omicron variant and the widespread use of vaccines have made the current coronavirus wave less severe in some ways than earlier ones. But it did not feel that way at 1:02 p.m. on Wednesday, almost halfway through Ms. Williams’s 12-hour shift in the emergency room at the Brooklyn Hospital Center.

She took a deep breath behind her turquoise-colored N95 mask, trying to dispel the constricting anxiety that came from what she described as “being pulled in too many directions at once.”

Then she turned her attention back to the task that kept getting interrupted: searching for a vein in the gaunt arm of a 70-year-old woman, a Covid-19 patient in need of screening for sepsis.

Like many hospitals in New York City, the Brooklyn Hospital Center is straining under the biggest surge of Covid-19 patients since spring 2020, when ambulance sirens filled the air and more than 20,000 New York City residents died.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/15/nyregion/brooklyn-omicron-cases.html