“Burnout is coming faster because of increased stress we have right now,” one nurse at Maimonides Medical Center said, who has been in the industry for 20 years. “We’ve seen nurses come into work and they’re turning in their notice that day; when you ask ‘What do you plan to do?’ they say they don’t have plans. I’ve never seen so many people willing to leave without a job in place.”

Private hospitals have struggled to fill the slots that nurses with decades of experience have left behind. Instead, administrators are floating nurses from one wing to another, sometimes out of their specialty, to cover for people who are out sick and begging nurses to stay late or come in early for their next shift. Those who do take sick leave or vacation receive calls from their superiors to come back to work regardless of how they are feeling, nurses said.

“Nurses have to take time off but they are being asked to come back. As recently as before Christmas they were calling people who were sick to see how sick they were and could come anyway,” one nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital said. “I hear people coughing around me and it feels like just a matter of time until I get it. I would be out for a while if I got sick.”