The Atlantic published a great in-depth article both documenting and explaining the mass exodus of U.S. healthcare workers during this pandemic. For those who can’t get through the paywall, below are some excerpts.
To be clear, as a starting point, we are talking about literally the most self-sacrificing and dedicated category of people in the country (at least as far as nurses and staff are concerned). Nonetheless, they’re being pushed out of our healthcare system just at the time we as a nation should be doing everything to keep them — being abused both by their hospital employers on the one side (under the theory that “the CEO’s salary is more important than reducing your pay”), and by deranged Covid-denying patients on the other:
”Since COVID-19 first pummeled the U.S., Americans have been told to flatten the curve lest hospitals be overwhelmed. But hospitals have been overwhelmed…
Some health-care workers have lost their jobs during the pandemic, while others have been forced to leave because they’ve contracted long COVID and can no longer work. But many choose to leave, including “people whom I thought would nurse patients until the day they died,” Amanda Bettencourt, the president-elect of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses…
In the spring of 2020, “I’d walk past an ice truck of dead bodies, and pictures on the wall of cleaning staff and nurses who’d died, into a room with more dead bodies,” Lindsay Fox, a former emergency-medicine doctor from Newark, New Jersey, told me. At the same time…
COVID patients are also becoming harder to deal with. Most now are unvaccinated, and while some didn’t have a choice in the matter, those who did are often belligerent and vocal. Even after they’re hospitalized, some resist basic medical procedures like proning or oxygenation, thinking themselves to be fighters, only to become delirious, anxious, and impulsive when their lungs struggle for oxygen. Others have assaulted nurses, thrown trash around their rooms, and yelled for hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, neither of which has any proven benefit for COVID-19. Once, Americans clapped for health-care heroes; now “we’re at war with a virus and its hosts are at war with us,”…
Several health-care workers told me that, amid the most grueling working conditions of their careers, their hospitals cut salaries, reduced benefits, and canceled raises; forced staff to work more shifts with longer hours; offered trite wellness tips, such as keeping gratitude journals, while denying paid time off or reduced hours; failed to provide adequate personal protective equipment; and downplayed the severity of their experiences.“
Anyway, here we are in the midst of a complete societal breakdown: practical and moral. Historians often have difficulty determining what caused great civilizations to collapse. Greed from the top allied with arrogant stupidity from the bottom is what is destroying this one.