Brendan Williams is the president and CEO of the New Hampshire Health Care Association.
In May 2020, when our nation reached the tragic milestone of 100,000 dead from COVID-19, a banner New York Times headline declared it “An Incalculable Loss.”
Now, as we approach one million dead, many seem to regard the virus as a mere nuisance, or, as Delta Airlines described it before backtracking, “an ordinary seasonal virus.”
Delta was responding to a 33-year-old federal judge, who never tried a case herself, declaring the surest means of avoiding viral transmission did not constitute “sanitation” — a ruling that caused ebullient airline passengers to throw off their masks mid-flight in moments caught in viral videos.
I do pray we are at an inflection point in the pandemic. A huge proportion of the public, including myself, was infected by the omicron variant of COVID-19. That likely confers at least temporary immunity to the virus, and most of us are fully vaccinated too. The exponential increase in the virus’s transmissibility, seen with omicron, magnified again by its BA.2 sub-variant, and magnified further by mutations of BA.2, are, mercifully, not spiking hospitalizations at this moment.
Yet that does not mean contracting the virus is a picnic. Three months later, despite no comorbidities, I must use an inhaler, and a panicked urgent care center sent me to a hospital emergency room, with a massive out-of-pocket bill as a souvenir. And the virus can still readily bring suffering and death to the immunocompromised, a population we seem to have left behind in our triumphalism over progress against the virus. If not for ourselves, we should take precautions for them.
Furthermore, COVID-19 has taken an enormous, lasting toll upon our health care system. Whether airline passengers must wear masks or not, there is no end in sight to the day-long necessity for health care workers to wear them. Nor is there any forgetting the misery and loss that you have witnessed.
The politicization of the virus has not helped. As one study of hospital intensive care unit nurses reported last month, “lack of consistent support from the community to slow the spread of COVID-19 or even recognition that COVID-19 was a real phenomenon increased nurses’ stress and feelings of isolation.” A survey last September found two-thirds of hospital nurses had considered leaving nursing due to pandemic stresses.
Over half of Vermont hospitals are facing critical staffing shortages. If the situation here is not as dire, it is only because hospitals are being forced to utilize “traveling nurses” at an extraordinary cost. Still, the New Hampshire Hospital has beds it cannot staff.
Too many New Hampshire nursing homes, being bankrupted by the national staffing agency costs hospitals are also paying, find it impossible to increase capacity. A national study estimated that 55% of New Hampshire nursing homes are at financial risk this year, with negative operating margins below -7.5%. This catastrophic assessment occurred before the Biden Administration’s recent announcement it would cut Medicare funding for nursing home care by a net $320 million nationally beginning October 1.
A just society cannot abandon those most at risk from the effects of COVID-19, whether death or serious illness, post-traumatic stress disorder from laboring daily to combat the virus or the economic calamity the virus has visited upon health care providers.
Yet I fear that in a rush to put this exhausting pandemic in the rear-view mirror we may overlook the collateral damage.