Hospitals don't have enough medical or human resources to tackle their caseloads. Which begs the question: what do they have enough of? The answer...
Generally speaking, hospitals have more than enough doses to meet demand. And that surplus will increase when the staffing crisis worsens because employees are choosing unemployment rather than meet the vaccine requirements of their employer and government.
The above is not new news. The below is. Let's get to the five best topics we came across this week:
- Commercial shippers like FedEx, UPS, and the rest are devoting a large amount of resources to distributing COVID-19 vaccines - as they should - but those are resources that aren't going toward shipping other goods. Supply chain disruptions are bad right now. They're going to get worse the closer we get to 2022. (So place orders now.)
- The ongoing healthcare worker shortage is going to worsen, as well, over the coming years. The downside is that stress and working hours will go up. The upside is that compensation packages are getting better all the time.
- The immediate pain of shortages will be felt as thousands of healthcare workers are no longer employed due to their anti-vaccine-mandate stances. This is a precursor to the wave that will arise in response to the newly outlined government mandates for all its employees.
- The politicization of vaccines and masks in providers mirrors the politics of the communities they provide for. No major surprise there. If you think that vaccines and masks have adequately beaten back the Delta variant, though, you might be in for a surprise.
- So what can you do? Get vaccinated and wear masks? Great. Except that it's becoming increasingly clear that cloth masks are insufficient to prevent infection. So we need more surgical masks in more widespread use. But that begs the question...
Who's going to manufacture more masks? When shortages inevitably occur, how do we prioritize who gets the best masks?
The answers to those questions are decidedly less obvious and simple. We wish we had better news in that regard. But understanding that there's going to be a problem - or that the problem is going to get worse - is a great first step toward figuring out a solution.
And we're here to help however we can. One tiny way is providing these news roundups and the additional article(s) that we share in our Five To Save newsletter. Sign up and let us take a little more of the burden off you. We don't offer any 100% effortless, magic solutions, but would you trust us if we did?