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A major health care provider in Arizona will allow employees who are experiencing mild COVID-19 symptoms or are asymptomatic to keep working at its hospitals and facilities. Because of the omicron variant’s rapid spread in Maricopa County and in anticipation of a continued increase, Dignity Health officials said they have enacted the “third tier” of the federal guidelines for health care workers with the coronavirus. (1/9)

As the raging omicron variant of COVID-19 infects workers across the nation, millions of those whose jobs don’t provide paid sick days are having to choose between their health and their paycheck. While many companies instituted more robust sick leave policies at the beginning of the pandemic, some of those have since been scaled back with the rollout of the vaccines, even though omicron has managed to evade the shots. Meanwhile, the current labor shortage is adding to the pressure of workers having to decide whether to show up to their job sick if they can’t afford to stay home. (D'Innocenzio and Durbin, 1/9)

As COVID-19 hospitalizations climb into uncharted territory, fueled by the highly contagious omicron variant, Maryland’s medical workforce is increasingly diminished by illness and exposure, burnout and turnover. Gov. Larry Hogan has responded with pleas for people to get vaccinated and boosted and wear masks to spare the hospitals. The state opened several testing sites near hospitals so people would stop flooding emergency rooms with nonemergencies. (Cohn and Miller, 1/8)

Erine Cressell worked as a hospital nurse for 15 years, with dreams of finishing an advanced degree and treating patients with addiction issues in her corner of Appalachia. That was before the pandemic. Beginning in 2020, she spent most of her days diverted to her hospital’s emergency room, tending to people who would have been admitted to the floors above, if only there was enough staff there to care for them. After her 12-hour shifts, she sometimes would sit on a curb in the hospital parking lot and cry. Then she would drive 45 minutes to her home in Glen Lyn, Va., and do her second job—which was supposed to be her only job—compiling data for the hospital’s quality department. Sneak in a little sleep, and repeat. (Feintzeig, 1/10)

“Most pharmacists who’ve been in the field for a while, have been telling students ‘just stop, don’t go to pharmacy school, do something else, anything else,’” one clinical pharmacist in Boston said. “I’m hoping that the people who are going into pharmacy school are doing it because they truly have a passion for it and will fight for it and want to do nothing else with their lives.” This pharmacist, who asked to remain anonymous for job security, said she’s faced challenges unique to the COVID era, including staffing shortages due to COVID outages and people leaving the industry. She’s even been asked to come into work while caring for her COVID-positive child, she said. (Sokolow, 1/9)