One was a vaccinated elderly man who’d tested positive for Covid after cold-like symptoms began spreading through his family. But his family couldn’t find him an open slot for an infusion of monoclonal antibodies. His granddaughter, Krystal Tejeda, called and called. “I couldn’t get an answer from anybody. Mailbox full, mailbox full,” she said. He was sent home after his first two ER visits. On the third, he was admitted, his skin going purple.

For another patient, Alozie hoped to get a new antiviral called Paxlovid. “But nobody’s seen it,” Alozie, who treats patients at five hospitals in El Paso, Texas, said last week. “I tried to write a prescription for it and the local pharmacists have said, ‘We don’t have it. You can write all the prescriptions you want, but it doesn’t matter.’”

The scarcity of outpatient Covid treatments is just one element in a cascade inundating hospitals from Boston to El Paso, from Florida to Washington state. Some medications that could neutralize earlier iterations of the coronavirus don’t work well against Omicron, the variant now racing through the population. Hospitals were already short-staffed, the result of pandemic trauma, burnout, and the Great Resignation; now, with alarming numbers of those who remain calling in sick with Covid, there’s a whole new level of backup and strain. Beds can’t be liberated because there aren’t enough workers in rehab centers or nursing homes. In other words, a bad time to need medical care — and an awful time to be providing it.