Hospitals are contending with critical staffing shortages, less institutional memory, and lower morale to band together and fight the next surge. The good will of health care workers that has gotten the country through the past two years is drying up. Health care workers are also “done” — done with having our sense of duty and commitment to patient care taken for granted.

This is layered atop a fragmented health care system. Former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s vision of a single state hospital system never materialized in New York, and the rest of the country never even aspired to anything like that. Wealthier hospitals with the capacity to take patients from safety net and rural hospitals crushed by Covid aren’t incentivized to do so. It makes more sense for them to keep more lucrative elective surgeries and other procedures going.

Without efforts to better control Covid-19 in the future, some hospitals will shoulder a disproportionate burden of Covid care. When hospitals are overwhelmed and understaffed, deaths from Covid shoot up, and other medical care suffers, too. A pause on non-Covid care at some hospitals may become the new normal.