Like the city they serve, hospital workers were caught off guard by Omicron and rocked by a sudden wave of infections that has sidelined scores of doctors and nurses, ahead of an unknown number of new COVID patients expected to arrive in coming weeks. Staff across the city’s private hospitals described in interviews stressful conditions where they had to cover for their colleagues, especially nurses who were already short-staffed. They also voiced concern that leaders are not taking testing and quarantine seriously, expressing unease with new guidance that can be interpreted as working while still sick or contagious. The situation in the city’s public hospitals is less clear: New York City Health + Hospitals, which oversees them, directed questions to the state’s health department, which said it does not track COVID cases by occupation, including health care.

While hospitals say they can handle the shortfall, the sudden, if temporary, reduction in staff has made for a tense environment for workers stretched to their limits after two years of the pandemic. Currently there are 54 COVID patients in public hospitals across the city, officials said. “It’s still not anywhere near the previous surges,” a doctor at North Central Bronx, a city-run hospital, said. “I just worked in the ICU last night, and maybe a 10th of the patients were COVID. That’s a super small percentage.” The Omicron surge is barely a week old and hospitalizations lag new cases. Nevertheless, physicians and nurses said they are hopeful any such surge would be muted by the city’s high vaccination rate. Those who worked through previous surges said they are not only prepared for another influx of the sick, but that hospitals are well-stocked with masks, personal-protective equipment, new ventilators, and more resources to expand the capacity of intensive-care units by creating negative pressure rooms that contain virus particles shed by sick patients. “For our department, we even have backup schedules if another ICU opens and we have to get redeployed. Our department has a back up plan,” one critical-care doctor at Mount Sinai said. “We are more prepared than we will need to be. My hope is that this is a more infectious but less severe variant and so many people have been vaccinated. I think we’re gonna see a lot of an uptick in cases, but not as many patients intubated.”