As of March 2020, in many parts of the world hospitals are overwhelmed with patients and
suffer from inadequate staffing and supply shortages. The medical staff is extremely tired, working
long hours and is struggling to get enough protective equipment.
This dire situation cannot be explained only by the sudden surge in cases of severe pneumonia.
By itself, it wouldn’t be enough to put some hospitals to a stress. There are many other factors
that contributed.
1. Lower hospitalization thresholds
In most cases coronavirus infection symptoms are mild. The particular attention to this
single illness lowered admission criteria to hospitals in the unprecedented way. Mild cases
are also hospitalized.
Hospital beds are also being used to quarantine healthy people returning from abroad [42, 39].
Most patients are elderly with multiple underlying conditions. Unless the present-day un-
healthy excitement over very common symptoms, these people would be passing away sur-
rounded by families in homes, hospices and elder-care facilities. Now, in the state of unwar-
ranted emergency, they are being pulled out from the nursing homes, hospitalized, treated
like lepers and die afraid, alone and isolated.
Over a few weeks, the hospital admission criteria have dramatically changed. It is not
directly caused by the new disease, but it is a result of new policies, health organization
recommendations and overall public focus and fear.
Normally the above cases would never consume health care system resources.
2. Medical personnel quitting for fear of infection
Severely exaggerated mortality rate repeated by health authorities and overall contagious
anxiety amplified by the media made many health care workers to quit a job as a way to
protect themselves and their families.
Also with the lockdown, schools and childcare facilities closed, some had no other choice than
to quit a job and take care of children themselves.
3. Supply chain of medical equipment disrupted by lockdown
Despite the medical supplies being exempted from the government restrictions, the general
disruption of transport and logistics caused that they are not reaching hospitals [40, 49, 19].
4. Panic shopping drained the medical supplies
Declaring a state of emergency led to stocking masks and gloves by citizens. In many cases,
health authorities recommended buying face masks and gloves in excess by everyone. It led
to depleting supplies and shortage for medical personnel.
5. Harassment of health care workers
Health care workers who remained at their posts are praised by authorities for their dedication
and sacrifice. There is another side to the story though. The same authorities, by overstating
the deadliness of the new disease and repeating claims unsupported by evidence, incited panic
to the level that citizens worry about coming into contact with health workers and contracting
disease. There are reports of discrimination and attacks on medical staff. They are being
evicted by landlords, refused rides on buses and dispirited by insults [28, 21, 24, 2, 20, 44].
6. Special safety precautions, the extreme measures that make the simplest things difficult
In particular, medical staff complains about excessive new procedures that were never needed
before. Whenever a single coronavirus case is detected the entire hospital ward must be
isolated, what disrupts normal operation.
7. Health care workers strikes over hazardous working conditions
The resulting shortages in protective equipment, the hastily imposed changes in hospital
procedures caused strikes by medical staff [4, 8, 50].
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