The staffing problems aren’t about just missing bodies, but also missing experience. As the oldest nurses resigned, their deep well of knowledge left too. Newly graduated nurses take twice as long to be onboarded as before the pandemic, Gwendolyn Oglesby-Odom, the chief nursing officer, told me, because the pandemic disrupted their training and left them with less clinical experience. Zavala said that travel nurses, too, used to be more seasoned and could be slotted into hospital routines after a short orientation, but agencies are now less stringent. Their workers need more hand-holding from experienced nurses who know that they’re earning significantly less. These factors all force physicians and veteran nurses to be extra vigilant about matters that they used to entrust to colleagues, adding to their already considerable strain.

Meanwhile, the patients haven’t stopped coming. Although Omicron is less severe than Delta, it is still potent enough and transmissible enough to fill Advocate Trinity with people struggling for breath, more than 90 percent of whom are either unvaccinated or partially vaccinated. COVID also exacerbated a slew of existing health problems: Before the pandemic, 80 percent of Advocate Trinity’s patients had diabetes, and many had asthma and chronic respiratory diseases. “Our patients are pretty sick coming in the door, because they haven’t been able to afford care and they haven’t seen a physician in years,” Zavala said.

COVID constrained sick people’s choices even further. Some people worried about contracting the disease in a hospital and spent months sitting on worsening chronic health problems. Others faced six-month wait times for a primary-care appointment and got sicker because they couldn’t get their medications. Opioid overdoses have surged, Anderson said, driven in part by the grief of losing loved ones and the pandemic’s other traumas. “We’ve been full since August, and there’s just a lot of people coming in for everything,” he said. “It’s not just that hospitals are busy on and off with COVID. We’re dealing with multiple crises at once, many of which are fueled by COVID.”