I don’t know if people realize that COVID ICU patients right now are sicker than, have every tube/medication/intervention as & are as unstable as our **very sickest & most unstable ICU patients pre-COVID**.

But now instead of maybe one patient this sick, we have 5 or 10 or 20.

It used to be only a few times a year our Level 1 ICU (for the sickest, most critically ill patients in the entire state) would see patients needing to be chemically paralyzed, proned, on lung bypass....but now we fill whole units with patients this ill. And they keep coming.

Talking with coworkers, many who have staffed COVID units and cared for these patients exclusively for eight months, they repeat over & over & over “It’s not doing this work that burns me out. It’s coming home & reading ignorant comments saying it’s all a hoax. Those break me.”