Nursing's a 2-4 year degree. Doctors take substantially more, and training both requires docs/nurses as professors and clinical instructors. I'm quite dubious that chucking money at the problem would've solved the staffing issue effectively.

Why would we require either a nursing or a doctor degree? I do not understand why we didn't just train a crop of "covid specialists" who could handle caring for covid positive people and recognizing when they needed help from the real medical staff. Doing something like this I feel we could have easily and quickly increased medical capacity as much as needed for covid.

> I do not understand why we didn't just train a crop of "covid specialists"...

Who'd be doing a wide variety of nurse/doctor tasks?

Vented ICU patients are complicated. They need more than a babysitter.

Most COVID patients even in hospitals aren't vented ICU ones, are they? While I get that you can't just throw money and catch doctors, is a fully credentialed doctor or nurse really necessary for every single task that could save a life in this kind of emergency situation?

It would work better than shooting from the hip and firing all the unvaccinated health professionals.

It really wouldn't have.

It'd buy you an extra percent or two; the numbers have been vanishingly small. Mayo Clinic lost about a percent. Factor in the fact they're more likely to get sick and it's even closer to a net zero.

I'm not inclined to treat antivax beliefs as "professional", especially in the healthcare field.

I have been vaccinated so definitely not antivax.

That type of thinking is completely wrong.

Hospitals are already working at or over capacity, they don't have 1 or 2 % to loose.

If the workers have made it this far, either they have had it and have immunity or they are very good at keeping themselves safe. In either case we should want them working.

> If the workers have made it this far, either they have had it and have immunity or they are very good at keeping themselves safe.

"Have immunity" turns out to be a flexible thing. If they're unboosted, they're more likely to be re-infected by Omicron.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/omicron-largely-evade...

"The new report (Report 49) from the Imperial College London COVID-19 response team estimates that the risk of reinfection with the Omicron variant is 5.4 times greater than that of the Delta variant. This implies that the protection against reinfection by Omicron afforded by past infection may be as low as 19%."

"Depending on the estimates used for vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection from the Delta variant, this translates into vaccine effectiveness estimates against symptomatic Omicron infection of between 0% and 20% after two doses, and between 55% and 80% after a booster dose. Similar estimates were obtained using genotype data, albeit with greater uncertainty."

> Hospitals are already working at or over capacity, they don't have 1 or 2 % to loose.

All the more reason to have a vaccination mandate.

This is fair in that there's a lot we'll need to learn about how our system works and fails under pressure from this all. Maximizing efficiency in peacetime leaves you ill-prepared for war, as it were.