America needs more doctors and nurses to survive the next pandemic

When Covid-19 first hit the US health care system, the biggest concerns about responding to the crisis were about physical infrastructure: Would hospitals have enough ventilators or physical space to care for a surge of patients? But the shortfalls that limited the American response were ultimately about the country’s human infrastructure: There were not enough nurses in hospitals, not enough staff in long-term care facilities, not enough public health workers.

There still aren’t. With a fourth wave building in December 2021 after the omicron variant emerged, Roberta Schwartz, a senior executive with Houston Methodist Hospital, summarized the conundrum like this: “You can send all the ventilators you want. I have no one to staff them.”

One of the primary lessons of the pandemic is that the United States must develop the ability to temporarily increase our health care staffing capacity whenever the next public health crisis arrives. We can’t magically create hundreds of new doctors and nurses at a moment’s notice. But we can make it easier to use the medical personnel we do have more effectively, to give us a fighting chance in an emergency scenario.