After two years of dealing with this virus—working extra shifts, watching families sob on grainy FaceTime calls while their loved ones slipped away—many health-care workers are already in a dark place. With a new wave of COVID upon us, we face this grim truth: You can’t surge a circuit that’s been burned out. For frontline providers, there’s simply no new fuse that can fix the fact that we’re fried.

Many people are holding out hope for the possibility that the Omicron variant may cause less severe disease. But this is little comfort for those worried about our hospitals and the people who work there: A large surge of even a more mild variant will still produce more patients than our already maxed-out system can handle. Moreover, doctors and nurses will themselves get sick.

The looming tidal wave of Omicron cases comes at an already challenging time for emergency departments across the U.S. The Delta wave never fully subsided, and a lot of ERs are already attending to too many COVID patients. Also making things worse: Emergency-room visits are up for non-COVID illness as well, in part because people have postponed some routine medical care throughout the pandemic. As a result, we head into winter with emergency rooms across the country overwhelmed and over capacity.