As coronavirus cases set new daily records, rural hospitals with staff shortages brace for a wave of Covid-19 cases

A nurse cares for a Covid-19 patient in Apple Valley, Calif. (Photo by Ariana Drehsler, AFP/Getty, via Marketplace)

As the Omicron variant of the coronavirus is causing new cases to reach record levels in the United States, hospitals are bracing for another wave of Covid-19 patients, and rural hospitals "are running out of backup plans," Savannah Maher reports for Marketplace, a syndicated public-radio program.

The pandemic has already "caused an exodus of doctors and nurses" and "the more transmissible omicron variant is sending some of the remaining workers home," Maher reports. "With the national shortage of health care workers, small, rural hospitals are having a hard time hiring."

“Just because of their locations, their financial situations are often more precarious,” Joanne Spetz of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco, told Maher. They are made more so by rural communities’ low vaccination rates: “You’re looking at potentially a large number of people coming into the small hospital and possibly having staff out sick.”

Maher has some state-by-state examples: "In New Mexico, more than half of hospitals face critical staffing shortages." In Vermont, “Our workforce is shrinking and stressed, you know, at a time when we need it to be growing and resilient,” said Jeff Tieman of the Vermont Association of Hospitals.