For most people — especially the vaccinated — Omicron presents as a sore throat or a mild inconvenience. But among the many patients in our hospital, the situation is serious. On a recent shift, I still saw “classic” Covid-19 patients, short of breath and needing oxygen. All of them were unvaccinated. I also saw elderly patients for whom Covid rendered them too weak to get out of bed. I treated people with diabetes in whom the virus caused serious and potentially fatal complications.

And even though nearly all of my patients are experiencing milder illness compared with March 2020, they still take up the same amount of space in a hospital bed. Right now, all patients with the coronavirus require isolation, so they don’t infect other patients, and the laborious use of personal protective equipment by health workers. Yes, there’s a fraction of patients who are incidentally found to have the virus — for example, a person needing an appendix removed who tests positive on screening. But entering the hospital with the virus versus for the virus isn’t a relevant distinction if the hospital doesn’t have the beds or providers needed to care for its patients.

This influx of coronavirus-positive patients is also creating another source of infection for health care workers, who are being sidelined in numbers I’ve never seen before.