Need a Covid-19 nurse? That'll be $8,000 a week - CNN

That threatens to shift the supply of nurses toward more affluent areas, leaving rural and urban public hospitals short-staffed as the pandemic worsens, and some hospitals unable to care for critically ill patients.

"That is a huge threat," said Angelina Salazar, CEO of the Western Healthcare Alliance, a consortium of 29 small hospitals in rural Colorado and Utah.

"There's no way rural hospitals can afford to pay that kind of salary."

Surge Capacity

Hospitals have long relied on traveling nurses to fill gaps in staffing without committing to long-term hiring.

Early in the pandemic, doctors and nurses traveled from unaffected areas to hot spots like California, Washington state and New York to help with regional surges.

But now, with virtually every part of the country experiencing a surge — infecting medical professionals in the process — the competition for the finite number of available nurses is becoming more intense.

"We all thought, 'Well, when it's Colorado's turn, we'll draw on the same resources; we'll call our surrounding states and they'll send help,'" said Julie Lonborg, a spokesperson for the Colorado Hospital Association.

Johnson, president of the North Dakota Nurses Association, said the pandemic appears to be hastening a brain drain of nurses there.

Doug Burgum told health care workers they could stay on the job even if they've tested positive for COVID-19.

All four of Utah's major health care systems have seen nurses leave for traveling nurse positions, said Jordan Sorenson, a project manager for the Utah Hospital Association.

"Nurses quit, join traveling nursing companies and go work for a different hospital down the street, making two to three times the rate," he said.

In Utah, the hospital association has talked with the state nursing board about allowing nursing students in their final year of training to be certified early.

Growth Industry

Meanwhile business is booming for companies centered on health care staffing such as Wanderly and Krucial Staffing.

"When COVID first started and New York was an epicenter, we at Wanderly kind of looked at it and said, 'OK, this is our time to shine,'" said David Deane, senior vice president of Wanderly, a website that allows health care professionals to compare offers from various agencies.

After all, a hospital in South Dakota isn't competing just with facilities in other states.

"We've sent nurses to Aruba, the Bahamas and Curacao because they've needed help with COVID," said Deane.

CEO Brian Cleary said that, since the pandemic started, the company has grown its administrative staff from 12 to more than 200.

"Right now we're at our highest volume we've been," said Cleary, who added that over Halloween weekend alone about 1,000 nurses joined the roster of "reservists."

With a base rate of $95 an hour, he said, some nurses working overtime end up coming away with $10,000 a week, though there are downsides, like the fact that the gig doesn't come with health insurance and it's an unstable, boom-and-bust market.

Hidden Costs

Amber Hazard, who lives in Texas, started as a traveling ICU nurse before the pandemic and said eye-catching sums like that come with a hidden fee, paid in sanity.

"How your soul is affected by this is nothing you can put a price on," she said.

At a high-paying job caring for COVID patients during New York's first wave, she remembers walking into the break room in a hospital in the Bronx and seeing a sign on the wall about how the usual staff nurses were on strike.

"It said, you know, 'We're not doing this.