my sister is doing critical care work as a nurse in a covid crisis zone earning less than 60K a year. this is with a decade of experience in some of the top hospitals in the country. i think HN has a very California/New York view of nurse’s compensation and status.
her previous hospital responded to covid by firing a lot of nursing staff (grandma’s couldn’t get knee replacements, but covid wasn’t super bad here yet so hospitals just shed resources only to need them again in two months).
hospital administrations responded to the crisis by cutting staff, cutting pay, and increasing their own salaries, while taking months to procure PPE for their workers. at the height of the iraq war, it was a big news story that soldiers had not been receiving adequate protection and that some of the vehicle and personnel armor they had received was defective. if we want to make a war analogy, this is blackwater contractors getting paid millions to play at war games geared to the tits and barely ever leaving the green zone while the soldiers doing the real grunt work are getting shredded by mandatory redeployments with no leave and issued substandard gear.
on top of that, covid has been functionally live clinical experimentation at mass scale. a lot of medicine has been made rote, so i think jaded people think it is just a big book of instructions. this pandemic was figuring things out live at runtime.
the compassionate response to a massive crisis in healthcare worker morale brought on by burnout due to extremely fast paced, high risk, high stress, highly specified work conditions during a global pandemic is something like “i hope this can be managed so that care can continue to be delivered” and not “they should get a new job”.