There are 23,000 more unfilled jobs in Texas for registered nurses than there are nurses seeking to fill them, according to a labor analysis by the Texas Workforce Commission…

Kroll said one hospital system in Central Texas reported a 25% turnover in the last year, far higher than average.

“We’ve had a significant number of people, [after] the first two waves, who just stepped away from the profession,” Kroll said. “It’s too stressful. It was really life and death.”

Now, a spike in the number of hospitalizations of mostly unvaccinated people due to the delta variant is again straining hospital staffs across the nation, making it more difficult for understaffed hospitals to transfer patients out or bring contract nurses in from other regions.