Workers on the frontline say they feel like they're repeating the same thing over and over as the Omicron variant spreads.
"It's like the movieGroundhog Day, and it's just the same stuff every day and it never goes away," said Taylor Dilick, a travel nurse currently working in South Carolina.
The Omicron variant is the most common variant in the US according to the Centers for Disease Control. The variant is believed to be more transmissible and data shows that it is doubling every two days.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts that over 1 million cases will be detected in the week leading up to Christmas. The variant may cause milder cases for those who have been boosted, but hospitalizations may still rise.
As of Tuesday, only a little more than 30% of the US population had received a vaccine, and only a little more than 70% of the total population had received at least one shot.
At the beginning of the Pandemic, frontline workers were hailed as heroes with "Thank you" signs and nightly clapping.
Insider has learned that nurses, teachers, and flight attendants are exhausted because of the rising COVID-19 cases in the coming months.
Flight attendants are working with passengers.
Travelers wearing face coverings wait in line at the north security checkpoint at the main terminal of Denver International Airport.
David Zalubowski
George Connelly, a flight attendant for Spirit Airlines, told Insider that he noticed that mask policies were getting under a lot of people's skin.
Since the start of the Pandemic, there have been a lot of altercations over masks on planes.
The passengers and flight attendants are frustrated that the Pandemic is still going on.
He said that they understand the protocols, but it seems like it's never-ending. There was a little bit of frustration on the front lines.
He said that he was recently attacked by a passenger on a flight and that he was unsure if it was due to the worry of traveling during the holiday season or a new variant.
The flights have not seen a drop in passengers, with many being full.
He hasn't noticed any added anxiety over Omicron for flight attendants.
It feels like it's the same sort of threat level for a lot of us in the industry. We're in a tin can at 36,000 feet with 200 people mostly confined, so regardless of mask or other protocols, it seems like we're still at the same exact risk level as before.
Students could return to remote learning.
Students in a class at Wilson High School in West Lawn, PA, where the desks in the classroom are doubled to provide extra spacing on October 22, 2020.
Ben Hasty is a member of the Media News Group.
The start of the Pandemic in early 2020 caused schools to stop in-person learning. Many schools were forced to switch to hybrid learning models as students and teachers got sick after they reopened.
A first-year high school teacher in Santa Clarita, California, told Insider that she's worried about having to shift to hybrid learning.
Maimone told Insider that she's more of a pen and paper kind of teacher and that it's hard to make those lessons translate to an online environment.
She said that a hybrid or virtual learning module can make learning more difficult because she is concerned that some students may not have the resources to learn at home.
You don't know what the home environment is like. You don't know what their internet access looks like. Maimone said that some kids were home but had to look after other siblings or kids as adults worked.
Maimone said that students who have been out of school for a year have left a gap in their emotional development, and she is worried about a return to virtual learning.
There is no substitute for in-person learning.
There could be a new wave.
In this Jan. 7, 2021, file photo, two nurses put a ventilator on a patient in a COVID-19 unit.
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
The rates of hospitalization and infections have varied throughout the country. In the past week, there has been a 369% increase in the number of cases in Washington, DC, and 1,050 National Guard members were called in to help with overfilled hospitals in Ohio.
The spread of Omicron means another wave for nurses, who have already been burnt out from limited staffing and the two years of a Pandemic that has left more than 600,000 Americans dead.
The holidays are arriving at a time when travel nurses' contracts are ending, so they are not in a rush to take on the next assignment.
The travel nurse told Insider she finished her assignment in Virginia last week but is taking a break before taking another job to deal with her mental health issues.
She said she needed a break. I think that work put on my mental wellbeing as well as my physical being. I was having a hard time with my mental health, not just from patient workload, but also from the work environment that I was in.
It's easy to project stress on one another because everyone is stressed out.
The overload of patients and the shortage of nurses has meant that she has to help out other nurses who are not specifically trained to treat COVID-19.
She said she has seen nurses leave the bedside in hospitals on the East Coast because they weren't being paid enough and the workload was too much.
The lack of adequate pay for staff nurses, along with working conditions, led to a mass exodus of nurses from South Carolina, according to the travel nurse.
With the capacity that the Pandemic has created, it's difficult to have enough well-trained nurses to treat COVID-19 patients.
She took a break from April to September this year because of the strain of seeing people die every day.
"I was burned out and I definitely needed that restart because I could feel myself again," Dilick said. I was exhausted.
She said that she sometimes thought that the Pandemic was under control until another wave hit. She said that it will only be possible when people get vaccinations, and that she won't speculate when the waves will stop.
Alea is excited for her shot.
The children's hospital.
According to Insider, another travel nurse has also seen nurses quit. Oakes said that while she loves caring for patients and sees herself as always being a nurse, she mainly stayed in her current role because the pay is lucrative.
She said that she is still committed to helping people, but things have gotten so bad that she is no longer committed to that. I still give my all at work and I want to take care of people as best I can, but I feel like I'm being unappreciated. The system is not getting better.
"So, I think the money is what's keeping a lot of us in the industry, which is also super concerning because that's not sustainable at all," Oakes said.
Oakes said she has seen kids with underlying conditions end up ill with COVID-19 throughout the Pandemic, but in the most recent wave at the end of the summer, she saw otherwise healthy kids experiencing more severe symptoms and some even die from it. Mild cases are being followed by others with long-haul symptoms.
She said that the new wave was a perfect storm. Kids are sick during the holidays, and a lot of them are in the hospital with all the germs that kids love to pass to each other.
Kids under five years old are not eligible for a vaccine if they are older than five.
"I think it's a lot of bad things," she said.
