How has COVID affected you and your everyday life? Things just are not the way they used to be COVID makes things a lot harder and more stressful, especially for nurses and doctors. Nurses and Doctors already have very stressful jobs to begin with and all the people coming in and out of the hospitals are not helping the problem. Hospitals around the world are filling up with tons of patients that have COVID, and people are having to wait a long time to get the help that they need. There are not enough resources to help all of these people. Eureka is having a big spike of COVID right now and people who are mostly not vaccinated are going into the hospital with severe conditions because they did not get vaccinated. They are using resources that the hospital has that could be much better used on sicker people. Getting vaccinated is the key to solving all of these problems. Research shows that you are 14 times more likely to get served COVID which could cause life-changing problems or death if you are not vaccinated. The nurses and doctors are having to work much harder because the hospital is filling up with unvaccinated people. Saint Josephs is a pretty small hospital that does not have as many resources to deal with as many patients. Nurses are becoming so overwhelmed and stressed out with all of their work that there are a lot of them quitting. Getting new nurses is hard because they know how stressful it is and so the number of Nurses in Saint Joseph's hospital is just decreasing as the workload keeps increasing. I interviewed my dad about some of the problems that the hospital is having with the COVID patients because he is a nurse and I asked him, why are there fewer staff at the hospital. His response was “Exposure to COVID and people getting COVID. Aso COVID has led some nurses to leave the profession because of the heavy workload, it's a vicious cycle.” 18% of healthcare workers have quit their jobs since the pandemic has started. We need to stop this problem of nurses quitting their jobs. We need to get people vaccinated as fast as possible so that the hospitals stop filling up with tons of people. Getting people vaccinated will also solve a lot of the other problems for the world. When I asked my dad what having less staff was doing to the hospital he said “The COVID 19 pandemic has taken a bad situation and made it much worse. RNs are now being forced to care for sicker patients with less help.” The hospital is also just not a very safe place to work anymore. There is almost nowhere inside the hospital where you can feel safe. When I asked my dad where can you feel safe in the hospital he said “We can feel safe from short staffing and the risk of contraction COVID when we go outside for our meals or when we get breaks.” This quote shows that when the nurses want to feel safe or have a break they have to go outside because that is the only place where there are no risks. Everyone also has to wear N-95 masks which are very uncomfortable. They cause headaches and they hurt people's skin and wearing them for 12 hours at a time is a very hard thing to do for some of the people working in the hospital. St. Josephs is also having problems with supply due to COVID. Getting resources into the hospital is becoming very hard. Many of the resources that they need to deal with their sick patients are being used up very fast and there are not a lot of resources going around. The hospital has to resort to other, lesser ways of doing things to deal with this problem. I asked my dad for an example of some of these worse methods and he replied “We have had to use a labor-intensive therapeutic technique called proning, positioning a patient on their stomach to improve the blood circulation in the lungs. This was rarely used before the pandemic but is now commonplace. This places strain on staff and places the patients at high risk of complications such as inadvertent extubation and skin breakdown.”Another problem is visitors who come to the hospital who want to see their sick loved ones. The hospital has a policy right now against visitors coming in to visit so that they can minimize the spread of COVID the best that they can. Some of the visitors that come in have a very hard time dealing with this fact and will often be disappointed and in rare cases will become very mad. You cannot blame them though because they just want to check in on the person that they love and it is hard for some of them to be away from each other for a long time. We need to be grateful for the nurses and doctors that are putting in their time and effort to help stop the spread of this global pandemic. If it weren't for them who knows how much worse this already terrible problem would be.