I did have an interesting conversation with a close friend of mine today that works for the st mark's hospital group (whatever massive company owns that hospital) processing data and reporting it. He says that as far as st mark's goes, the struggle with overload is real insofar as the hospital is understaffed to begin with and like 15-20% of their doctors and nurses are out with covid right now. They only have like 28 covid patients and only 2 in icu and so far omicron cases have been pretty mild, but they only have a couple protocols for covid treatment so they still approach these cases with the same treatments as the more severe cases they saw last year.
He thinks/hopes that hospitalizations likely won't spike in line with the case numbers and the treatment protocols and quarantine protocols will continue to evolve over the next couple months to be more in line with the lower severity of this variant.
But, who the hell knows anymore. I've spent the last couple days getting lectured by customers that inexplicably think I either wrote the mandate myself or give a damn about their opinion about it. The most annoying part is we aren't even forcing people to wear them (not our job to baby sit people on behalf of the health department). They just still feel compelled to act like everyone wants to hear their opinion about it. Literally don't care, sell crazy somewhere else, what beer can I get you.
It's a fun time to be in the service industry.