I’m a local politician in a small university town in a predominantly rural county in Wisconsin. I’ve spent 12 years as a county board supervisor and the last six months as a city councilor.
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Covid is eating our health and emergency services people alive. One of the chief jobs of the local politician is oversight. As part of that job, I spend a lot of time in meetings listening to reports. I’ve been doing this for 12 years in a time of ever increasing budget shortfalls, and I have never seen the people most directly responsible for our communal health and well being looking so devastated as they are right now.
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From fire and rescue first responders, through public health officials, to hospital and nursing home staff, the people who keep the rest of us alive when things go wrong are exhausted and burned out. Many have left the world of public service. Many more are on the brink of breaking. I am seeing multi-year veterans of the field who have, over the years, seen the results of fire, disease, and horrific accidents looking utterly worn down and obviously struggling to hold it together.
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I am not in the direct focus of the crisis, so I can only infer what they are going through from my own much less traumatic experience as a public official trying to keep things together and people alive in the face of willful disregard of the most basic public safety precautions. Given how exhausted and burned out I am from the emotional toll of that much lesser burden, I am frankly in awe of the will that keeps them all going.
Our public health and emergency management systems and the people who make them work are breaking because too many won’t take the basic steps of getting vaccinated, getting boosted, avoiding crowds, masking, and social distancing. With Omicron on the horizon that is only likely to get worse. We are going to lose more of those people to burnout, to breakdown, to early retirement, and to death from covid over the coming months, and for many of them there are no replacements on the horizon.
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One of my other jobs as a local politician is to see that we can recruit the people we need to fill exactly those jobs, and it is becoming increasingly difficult. Our nursing home has had to temporarily shut down wards because we simply can’t hire the skilled nursing staff necessary to fill them. We’re in a budget crunch there and filling those beds would help us enormously on that front. The patients are asking to get in, we’re having huge numbers of referrals, but we can’t accommodate them. Our fire and rescue services are having similar problems. I just listened to a report on that side talking about raising retirement age because we’re looking at a future where maybe when you call for an ambulance there are no EMTs to staff it because the next generation isn’t signing up.
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Things are likely to get a lot worse before they get better. Doubly so if a huge segment of our population doesn’t figure out that we’re in a crisis and start taking the steps necessary to mitigate it. I am out of patience. I am exhausted and burned out and having a damned hard time convincing myself that I want to continue in local government. I am going to hang in there for now, largely because I am a small part of the support structure those people in public health and EMMS rely on, and I will not voluntarily let them down. But once we’re out the other side of the pandemic and through the end of my next term (assuming I am releected), I will be taking a hard look at whether 14 years is enough.
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Vaccinate. Boost. Mask. Distance.