My wife is an operating room circulating nurse at Beaumont in Michigan (Metro Detroit).
Lots of people without the title of nurse (RN) are furloughed or laid off. Entire hospitals are closed and covid19 patients transferred to other hospitals. Cleaning and supporting staff has been cut down to bare minimums to save costs. She is being sent home early most days due to low volume, impacting her pay too.
She worked covid19 ER shifts receiving walk in patients coughing like hell. That dried up a month ago and she had the choice to stay home or work night shifts on the floor medicating and caring exclusively for covid19 patience. So she did night shifts for two weeks. Now she is back on her regular position, underemployed.
She laughed about the field hospitals. Now, here in Michigan, we are all, including Nurses and hospitals, sitting around most of the day doing nothing and waiting for some miracle.
There was never a capacity issue she knows of. Only shortages of PPE.
To me it appears that the quarentine was effective? Look at the chart above - on March 21st the stay at home order went into effect in michigan. They peaked 2 weeks later at 1200 active cases in the hospital. Now its dropped back to the same amount as just before the stay at home order went into effect.
Underemployed seems like... a good position to be in right now, no?
Depends on the way you look at this, and what your politics are.
Underemployed hospitals means a lot of procedures are not happening right now. Lots of chemo and similar things. Those will be facing long waiting lists once the state opens back up. If you even get those patients to come back in the next months. I think the risks are somewhat distorted. If you are skipping chemo because you are scared of Covid19, you may be missing something. And yes, chemo was deemed not essential as far as I can tell. I think they call those excess deaths, and it's very hard to say how those will shape up.
From a resident perspective, I see a flat curve with plenty of capacity, even of ventilators, and still a closed up state. But that's getting us into politics. The governor is following a timeline of opening up to normal maybe within 4-6 month. As long as sections are closed up, you need to sustain comfortable unemployment benefits to keep people even halfway in line to play along. Soon the money for that will run dry. It seems like she can extend stay-at-home orders without democratic agreement, but once the money runs dry, she cannot make a budget by herself. So things will get ugly eventually.
She worked covid19 ER shifts receiving walk in patients coughing like hell. That dried up a month ago and she had the choice to stay home or work night shifts on the floor medicating and caring exclusively for covid19 patience. So she did night shifts for two weeks. Now she is back on her regular position, underemployed.
She laughed about the field hospitals. Now, here in Michigan, we are all, including Nurses and hospitals, sitting around most of the day doing nothing and waiting for some miracle.
There was never a capacity issue she knows of. Only shortages of PPE.