Every willing pair of hands needed

Staff shortages and burnout were already serious problems when the pandemic hit. COVID19 has made everything that much worse.

The date, Feb. 1, 1957. The place, Rikers Island, N.Y., home to one of America’s most notorious prisons.

On that cold, snowy night, Northeast Airlines Flight 823 – close to overloaded with passengers and luggage – took off from New York’s Laguardia Airport for Miami.

The plane slowly gained altitude, then, as planned, banked to the left, taking it over the East River and Rikers Island. But the aircraft hadn’t climbed high enough. It clipped the treetops and crashed a minute after takeoff.

Twenty passengers died. Eighty-one others, including six crew, had survived.

But they were in grave danger.

The nearly new DC-6, still laden with jet fuel, burst into flames. There were injuries. And based on their location, on an island without a bridge to the nearby city, emergency responders had no way to quickly get to Rikers.

Confronting catastrophe, the prison night warden made an instant judgment call. He opened the gates, sending inmates scrambling over the snow-covered terrain and toward the brightly burning fuselage to try to help. It worked.

The survivors were rescued. In recognition of their bravery, more than 50 inmates were either released or had their sentences shortened.

What’s the point of this story? In a crisis, you need to make decisions based on the greater good.

Now, in no way am I comparing the Rikers convicts to Nova Scotia health-care workers off work for refusing to get vaccinated.

Those men at Rikers no doubt earned their prison sentences. Meanwhile, recent studies have shown vaccination offers no guarantee – and only modest protection, depending on time elapsed since your last shot – against either getting infected or being infectious with the latest Omicron variants.

But what is similar is Nova Scotia, like many jurisdictions, is facing a crisis – a fullblown emergency situation in health care.

The signs are everywhere. Nightmarish waits for critical health care – ambulances that never show up, hours spent in jammed ERS, long waitlists for surgeries or other urgent treatments, or even a family doctor.

There are many reasons. Lack of staff is the biggest.

We’re short of doctors. Short of nurses. Short of paramedics. Short of, well, you get the picture.

For example, a Nova Scotia Nurses Union spokeswoman told me recently there are now close to 2,000 nursing vacancies across the province. That includes about 1,600 registered nurses, as well as nurse practitioners and licensed practical nurses.

To deliver health care, you need staff to do the delivering. That’s part of why you’re reading and seeing so many troubling stories.

So, that’s bad enough. But trying to keep the system running also takes an increasing toll on the health-care workers we’ve got.

Staff shortages and burnout were already serious problems when the pandemic hit. COVID-19 has made everything that much worse.

So why, when nurses and others are run off their feet, is Nova Scotia not doing what most other provinces have already done, end the vaccine mandate for health-care workers?

In the U.K., the government was to implement a health-care worker vaccine mandate on April 1. They pulled the plug on that plan in mid-march, wisely surmising the cost would be out of proportion to the presumed benefit.

Yes, some governments are also keeping their vaccine mandates in health care. But that doesn’t mean it makes sense.

As I argued in another recent column, the science on Omicron, and especially its newest variants, BA.4 and BA.5, shows we’re now dealing with a highly mutated virus that’s extremely hard for human immune systems, even ones with full vaccinations and previous COVID-19 infections, to handle.

Thankfully, vaccinations and previous infections do lower considerably the risk of severe illness, hospitalization and death, but do less to prevent being infected or reinfected, or being infectious to others.

In other words, unvaccinated health-care workers – though I question their decision not to be inoculated – don’t seem to present more of a risk to others than their vaccinated colleagues, especially if they’re also being regularly tested and are isolating if unwell.

But we continue to keep them off the job while coworkers are run off their feet.

Like the Rikers Island warden, we need to keep our priorities straight.

I know that even if the vaccine mandate were rescinded this afternoon, those unvaccinated health-care workers would be far short of what’s needed.

But this is a crisis. Every willing pair of hands is needed.