New York Nurses to go on Strike if demands aren’t met

Luke 21:11 “There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Major US City Prepares for Nurses to Go on Strike, Impacting Hospitals
  • A spokesperson for New York Mayor Eric Adams’s administration said the fire department has plans to reroute ambulances, while NYC Health + Hospitals will implement an emergency plan to deal with patients amid the staffing shortfall.
  • “We recognize the effect that a nurse strike would have on health care in our city and we are actively planning for different scenarios to minimize any impact to New Yorkers and ensure that the people of our city continue to receive care,” a City Hall spokesperson said in a statement.
  • As of the morning of Jan. 8, the New York State Nurses Association, a union representing 42,000 members across the state, said no new agreement was reached with area hospitals. It said about 8,700 union nurses at three hospitals—Montefiore Bronx, Mount Sinai Hospital, and Mount Sinai Morningside and West—will go on strike if the union’s demands aren’t met.
  • Union officials say the nurses are demanding higher wages, better health care benefits, and a smaller nurse-to-patient ratio.

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Global shortage of nurses set to grow as pandemic enters third year – group

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – The numbers of nurses around the world are falling further just as the Omicron coronavirus spreads, and there is a also an imbalance as Western countries step up recruitment of healthcare workers from African and other poorer countries, the International Council of Nurses said on Friday.

Many nurses are burned out from the COVID-19 pandemic and rates of “intention to leave” within a year have doubled to 20-30%, said Howard Catton, CEO of the Geneva-based group that represent 27 million nurses in 130 national associations.

“I think that we are at a tipping point … if those numbers continue the trend that we are seeing, it could be an exodus of people,” Catton told a news briefing.

“I almost think that governments need to be thinking about the life support package of measures they need to be putting together to invest in their nurses and their health care workers next year,” he said.

At least 115,000 nurses have died from COVID-19, but Catton said this World Health Organization figure from the start of the pandemic through May was conservative and the true figure is probably twice that.

There was already a global shortage of 6 million nurses pre-pandemic and some 4.75 million nurses are due to retire over the next few years, he added.

On average, wealthy countries have nearly 10 times the rate of nurses in terms of their populations compared with poor nations, but many are recruiting overseas to staff their hospitals, he said, noting that the Philippines and India were traditional exporters.

“We have absolutely seen increased recruitment activity by the UK and Germany as examples in Europe, the U.S. and Canada in North America as well,” he said. He added that African countries such as Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria were seeing their nurses recruited.

The emergence of the Omicron coronavirus variant, first detected last month in southern Africa and Hong Kong and now reported in nearly 60 countries, has caused fresh anxiety.

“My sense is that nurses around the world, I think like all of us were perhaps starting to feel that we were starting to see light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, but now there is a palpable anxiety that we could be going back close to square one,” Catton said.

(Additional reporting by Cecile Mantovani; Editing by Frances Kerry)

British army to start driving tankers as queues for fuel continue

By Guy Faulconbridge

LONDON (Reuters) -British soldiers will start driving tankers to replenish empty pumps, as drivers queued again for fuel after days of shortages, despite Prime Minister Boris Johnson saying the situation was improving.

Britain has been gripped by a rush of panic-buying for almost a week that has left pumps dry across major cities, after oil companies warned they did not have enough tanker drivers to move petrol and diesel from refineries to filling stations.

Business minister Kwasi Kwarteng said 150 soldiers had been mobilized, and would be driving tankers within a few days.

“The last few days have been difficult, we’ve seen large queues. But I think the situation is stabilizing, we’re getting petrol into the forecourts. I think we’re going to see our way through this,” Kwarteng said.

Johnson has sought to quell concerns, saying supplies were returning to normal while also urging people not to panic buy.

A shortage of around 100,000 drivers has sown chaos through supply chains and raised the specter of empty shelves and price increases at Christmas.

Asked if he could guarantee that there would not be problems in the run-up to the busy retail period, Kwarteng said: “I’m not guaranteeing anything. All I’m saying is that, I think the situation is stabilizing.”

By the early morning rush hour there were already long queues of cars in and around London and on the busy M25 orbital motorway circling the capital. Signs were up at some sites announcing no fuel was available.

The gridlock has sparked calls for doctors, nurses and other essential workers to be given priority access to fuel, a move Johnson has resisted.

Industry groups said the worst of the shortages seemed to be in London, the southeast and other English cities. Fights have broken out as drivers jostled.

The Petrol Retailers Association (PRA), which represents independent retailers who account for about two-thirds of all the 8,380 UK filling stations, said on Tuesday 37% its members’ stations were out of fuel.

The shortages have added to an air of chaos in the world’s fifth-largest economy, leaving gaps on supermarket shelves. A spike in European wholesale natural gas prices has also tipped energy companies into bankruptcy.

Britain left the EU single market at the start of this year, preventing haulers from recruiting drivers in the bloc. To tackle the shortage, the government has said it will issue temporary visas to 5,000 foreign drivers, a measure it had previously ruled out.

“What we want to do is make sure that we have all the preparations necessary to get through until Christmas and beyond, not just in supplying the petrol stations but all parts of our supply chain,” Johnson said.

Haulers, petrol stations and retailers say there are no quick fixes as the shortfall of drivers is so acute, and transporting fuel demands training and licensing. European drivers may also be reluctant to take up the visa offer, which only lasts until Dec. 24.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Writing by Kate Holton; Editing by Michael Holden and Peter Graff)

Philippines offers nurses in exchange for vaccines from Britain, Germany

By Neil Jerome Morales

MANILA (Reuters) – The Philippines will let thousands of its healthcare workers, mostly nurses, take up jobs in Britain and Germany if the two countries agree to donate much-needed coronavirus vaccines, a senior official said on Tuesday.

The Philippines, which has among Asia’s highest number of coronavirus cases, has relaxed a ban on deploying its healthcare workers overseas, but still limits the number of medical professionals leaving the country to 5,000 a year.

Alice Visperas, director of the labor ministry’s international affairs bureau, said the Philippines was open to lifting the cap in exchange for vaccines from Britain and Germany, which it would use to inoculate outbound workers and hundreds of thousands of Filipino repatriates.

Nurses are among the millions of Filipinos who work overseas, providing in excess of $30 billion a year in remittances vital to the country’s economy.

“We are considering the request to lift the deployment cap, subject to agreement,” Visperas told Reuters.

Britain is grappling with the world’s sixth-highest coronavirus death toll and one of the worst economic hits from the pandemic, while Germany has the 10th most infections globally.

While the two countries have inoculated a combined 23 million people, the Philippines has yet to start its campaign to immunize 70 million adults, or two-thirds of its 108 million people. It expects to receive its first batch of vaccines this week, donated by China.

The Philippines wants to secure 148 million doses of vaccines altogether.

The British embassy in Manila did not immediately respond to a request for comment while calls to Germany’s mission went unanswered.

In 2019, almost 17,000 Filipino nurses signed overseas work contracts, government data showed.

While Filipino nurses have fought to lift the deployment ban to escape poor working conditions and low pay at home, the workers-for-vaccine plan has not gone down well with some medical workers.

“We are disgusted on how nurses and healthcare workers are being treated by the government as commodities or export products,” Jocelyn Andamo, secretary general of the Filipino Nurses United, told Reuters.

Portugal extends lockdown as COVID-19 brings health service to its knees

By Sergio Goncalves and Catarina Demony

LISBON (Reuters) – Portugal’s parliament extended a nationwide lockdown on Tuesday until mid-February, as Prime Minister Antonio Costa accepted blame for the world’s worst coronavirus surge, with hospitals on the verge of being overrun.

With 10 million people, Portugal reported a record 303 COVID-19 deaths and 16,432 new cases on Thursday, and now has the world’s highest per capita seven-day averages of both new cases and deaths.

Costa told TVI broadcaster overnight the situation was “not bad, but terrible … and we’ll face this worst moment for a few more weeks”.

The situation had worsened partly because his government relaxed restrictive measures between Christmas and the end of the year, he said, with the country now grappling with a virulent new variant of the virus first detected in Britain.

“There were certainly errors: often the way I transmitted the message to the Portuguese … and, when the recipient of the message did not understand the message, then it is the messenger’s fault,” he said. The lockdown should, in principle, start reducing infection numbers next week, he added.

Some hospitals are running out of beds, others see dwindling oxygen supplies, and doctors and nurses are over-stretched. Staff at the Cascais Hospital, near Lisbon, told Reuters they were exhausted. “There is no end in sight,” one nurse said.

The new lockdown, which came into force on Jan. 15 for the first time since the initial wave of the pandemic, will last at least until Feb. 14. Non-essential services are closed, remote work is compulsory where possible and schools are shut.

“Unfortunately we are dealing with a disease that surprises us every day and we do not give up… we continue to fight every day,” Health Minister Marta Temido told parliament before lawmakers voted to extend the lockdown.

Germany said on Wednesday it was willing to help and had sent military medical experts to Portugal to assess what kind of support it could bring.

But Costa said there was only so much European partners could do. “One should be cautious” about the idea of sending patients abroad from Portugal, which has a land border only with already over-stretched Spain.

Regarding possible German aid, he said: “In everything Portugal has asked for, unfortunately they have no availability, namely doctors, nurses.”

Officials said the first phase of Portugal’s vaccination plan will be extended by around two months into April as delivery delays mean the country will receive just half the expected doses by March.

(Reporting by Victoria Waldersee, Sergio Goncalves and Catarina Demony; Writing by Ingrid Melander and Catarina Demony; Editing by Andrei Khalip, Larry King, Peter Graff)

Prayers and faxed letters: Texas woman buries husband who died of COVID-19

By Callaghan O’Hare and Maria Caspani

HOUSTON (Reuters) – As hundreds of thousands of people in Texas fled their homes ahead of Hurricane Laura on Wednesday, Michelle Gutierrez was in Houston burying her husband David, who died of COVID-19 on Aug. 14.

The couple would have celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary on Sept. 4, a few days after David’s 54th birthday. Michelle and David met at a mechanic’s shop in Houston in 2009, when he had stepped in as a translator to help her with a mechanic who only spoke Spanish.

He then offered to fix her computer, and the rest is history. They built a life together in Houston, where they raised five children and he worked as a software engineer.

In early July, David was hospitalized after his symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, worsened. His wife and two daughters had tested positive but showed no symptoms.

David would fight the virus for over a month at Houston’s St. Luke’s in The Woodlands hospital, where he eventually died of heart failure.

“It’s been a roller coaster, every day is different,” Michelle said on the day of his funeral, her voice breaking with emotion. “One day you’re fine and the next day, you walk around and memories flood your mind… You just wish this was all a dream.”

About a week after her husband was hospitalized, Michelle and her daughters gathered under his hospital window to pray for him.

“And then after that first night I was like, ‘You know what, I’m gonna come in every night, honey, I’m going to be here every night, praying for you and just being there in spirit’,” she said.

And so she did, until the Friday in August when David passed away.

Michelle said she kept trying to communicate with her husband as his condition worsened. At first, before he was put on a ventilator, they managed to text one another, she said. But once he was in a coma, she began faxing letters to the hospital, and nurses would read them aloud to him.

David is one of thousands who have succumbed to the coronavirus in Texas, where a spike in cases in June and July strained hospital systems as the virus engulfed many southern states.

Nearly 180,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19, the highest in the world, with 5.8 million cases recorded nationwide, according to a Reuters tally, also the highest in the world.

At David’s wake, a bottle of hand sanitizer and social distancing signs were prominently displayed as masked mourners walked to the casket to bid their farewells.

As for the future, Michelle said she was enrolling in a college nursing program. She had already planned to do so before her husband’s passing, but feels more motivated now.

“That’s more so now than before after seeing how these nurses took care of David and they were wonderful… And I could not have done it without them.”

(Reporting by Callaghan O’Hare in Houston, Texas and Maria Caspani in New York; Writing by Maria Caspani; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

A nurse struggled with COVID-19 trauma. He was found dead in his car

By Gabriella Borter

(Reuters) – Becoming a nurse in 2018 was a dream come true for William Coddington.

He loved helping people and feeling needed at his West Palm Beach, Florida hospital. The 32-year-old was on the upswing of a decade-long battle with opioid addiction and other substance abuse, according to friends and family, who said he was committed to his recovery.

It all started to unravel in March, as fatally ill COVID-19 patients showed up in his intensive care unit.

It rattled Coddington to see patients his age die, his mother Carolyn said. He could no longer attend his 12-step recovery meetings in person. He was scared about how little personal protective equipment he had. He had nightmares about alarms going off on ventilators in the ICU.

On the night of April 24, he spoke by phone to his best friend Robert Marks and sounded distraught, Marks said. Coddington was caught between the war zone at work and his confinement at home.

“Don’t take unnecessary risks but hang in there,” Marks texted him.

The next morning, Coddington was found dead in his car in a hotel parking lot in Deerfield Beach, Florida.

His family suspects a drug overdose. A spokeswoman for the Broward County Medical Examiner’s office said the case is pending. The Broward County Sheriff’s Office said it is still investigating but does not suspect foul play.

Reuters reconstructed Coddington’s last weeks through some of his text messages, Facebook posts and interviews with his parents, brother and two close friends. Reuters could not independently verify Coddington’s cause of death.

Frontline healthcare workers are trying to cope with the trauma of treating the novel coronavirus, which has inundated U.S. hospitals with desperately ill patients and killed more than 90,000 Americans in less than three months.

Healthcare workers with histories of substance abuse may have more difficulty coping with fear, isolation and witnessing so much death during the pandemic, psychiatrists told Reuters. Those factors could provoke relapses in workers recovering from addiction, they said.

“Patients who are being treated for opioid use disorder have reported increased stress and opioid craving since this pandemic began,” said Kelly Dunn, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University who researches opioid use.

SCARED, BUT COMMITTED

Coddington grew up living with his mother, an executive assistant at a healthcare company, in Deerfield Beach after his parents got divorced in 2001.

Coddington’s family said he was addicted to opioids from a young age. It started with painkillers he received after a leg surgery, Coddington told his friend Skye Alexander, whom he met in nursing school.

Coddington entered inpatient rehabilitation at age 21, his mother said. When he emerged, he joined 12-step fellowships, self-help healing groups, and therapy.

“He was always trying different things to find the stability to interact with the world,” said Marks, a resident of Miami Beach who knew Coddington for 10 years.

When COVID-19 patients in March started arriving at JFK Medical Center’s North campus, where Coddington worked for 3 months, he volunteered for the coronavirus unit.

He did it because he was younger than some of his colleagues, and so potentially less likely to become severely ill, and because he was not a parent, said his friend Alexander.

“That was the type of person Will was,” she said.

Still, Coddington was scared, his friends said. He risked exposure and infecting his 65-year-old mother, with whom he still lived.

Palm Beach County ranks third in Florida behind Miami-Dade and Broward counties for confirmed coronavirus cases; nearly 300 people have died of COVID-19 there.

Coddington said in an April 13 Facebook post that his hospital had a shortage of protective equipment, especially crucial N95 respirator masks. He said he didn’t blame his employer because the issue was widespread.

“In my hospital we are rationing 1 n95 mask for my whole shift,” Coddington wrote. “We are running out of gowns. We are having people make makeshift face shields that end up snapping.”

Days before he died, his face shield fell off while he was helping with an intubation, which involves putting tubes into patients’ airways to assist breathing, said his father Ronald, a port engineer in Palm Beach.

“He literally felt things splash on his face,” Ronald recalled his son telling him.

Kathryn Walton, a spokeswoman for JFK Medical Center, part of the hospital group HCA Healthcare, declined to comment on Coddington’s death except to extend condolences to his family. She said the hospital’s goal was always to protect employees.

The hospital has “adequate supplies of PPE” and is “taking steps to conserve PPE because we do not know what our future needs will be,” Walton said.

She said the hospital offers mental health counseling by phone and video. Coddington’s friends and family say they don’t know if he used those services.

‘BRACING FOR IMPACT’

Coddington suffered from the social isolation imposed by the pandemic, his family and friends said.

He loved being around people, said Marks, who first met Coddington at a diner. Coddington’s “wacky” impersonations of TV characters endeared him to Marks right away.

“He was like a character all on his own,” Marks said.

Coddington relied on 12-step meetings to stay sober, but after one virtual video gathering, he told his mother it was not as helpful.

“He couldn’t meet with his sponsor,” she said. “And his friends, nobody wanted to see him because he worked in a hospital, not even to sit 6 feet apart.”

In his last weeks, Coddington came home from work, spoke little and played video games in his room, Carolyn said. His impersonations – including one of her Southern accent that always made them laugh – stopped.

His friend Alexander, of Sunrise, Florida, said she noticed the change too: “It was despair … creeping in.”

Coddington had relapsed before. In 2017, while on a break from nursing school, he had ended up on a ventilator, according to Alexander, who said she visited him in the hospital. She said Coddington told her he had overdosed on the club drug Gamma-Hydroxybutyrate (GHb).

With the pandemic weighing on Coddington, his loved ones were “bracing for impact,” Marks said. Carolyn checked on him constantly. His father and friends called and texted.

“You are so needed right now by others. You can be great,” Ronald Coddington said to his son in text messages on April 1. “Please please bury me some day. Don’t make me bury you … I love you.”

“I love you too,” Coddington replied.

CRAVING RELIEF

The night of April 24, Coddington argued with his mother, who feared a relapse was coming. They made up, but he announced he was heading to a hotel for a good night’s sleep.

Coddington kissed Carolyn and assured her she could track his location on her phone. He called Marks that evening, expressing how trapped he felt between the chaos at work and being cooped up at home.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about him because of how upset he sounded,” Marks said. Sleepless at 1:24 a.m., Marks sent his friend $20 on Apple Pay to buy himself coffee before his shift.

Coddington never responded. Carolyn checked his location the morning of April 25. He wasn’t at the hospital. She drove to the hotel and found him dead in his car.

Ronald Coddington said police told him they obtained a video, likely hotel security footage, showing his son sitting in his car in the parking lot that night when another car briefly pulled alongside. Ronald said there was “some kind of exchange” between his son and the other vehicle’s driver that he suspects was a drug deal.

The Broward County Sheriff’s office did not respond to Reuters’ request for the video.

Family members think the toxicology report, expected in a few weeks, will confirm an overdose – a temporary escape gone wrong.

“Do I think he wanted to die that night? 100% no,” said his friend Marks. “I would bet every dollar I have that it was in an effort to have some relief.”

(Reporting by Gabriella Borter; Editing by Ross Colvin and Marla Dickerson)

A day fighting COVID-19: U.S. hospital staff share hardest moments on shift

BALTIMORE, Md. (Reuters) – The shifts are long and the scenes are heartbreaking inside a Maryland hospital where nurses and doctors have been treating coronavirus patients for weeks, unable to let family inside to visit loved ones on their death beds.

One of the hardest moments of a recent work day for registered nurse Julia Trainor was intubating a patient, and then calling the patient’s husband so he could talk to his wife. He was not allowed in the hospital.

“I had to put him on the phone and hold the phone to her ear as he told her that he loved her so much, and then I had to wipe away her tears,” says Trainor, who works in a surgical intensive care unit. “I’m used to seeing very sick patients and I’m used to patients dying, but nothing quite like this.”

The highly infectious COVID-19 disease caused by the novel coronavirus has infected more than 580,000 people across the United States and killed nearly 24,000.

In Maryland, where residents have been ordered to stay at home since March 30 to stem the spread of the disease, around 9,000 have tested positive for the virus and more than 260 have died.

After finishing what for many was a more than 12-hour shift, some nurses and doctors at one hospital shared with Reuters the hardest moments of their days. The hospital asked that it not be named.

The medical workers agreed that one of the toughest parts of the job – more than the exhausting schedule or adjusting to work in a new unit – was witnessing the toll on patients and families.

Because of the hospital’s no-visitor policy, which was implemented to prevent further spread of the virus, the medical staff must care for the patients’ physical needs and offer as much emotional support as they can muster in the absence of the patients’ families.

“The hardest moment during the shift was just seeing COVID patients die helpless and without their family members beside them,” says Ernest Capadngan, a nurse in the hospital’s biocontainment unit.

Communicating with the families has weighed heavily on the hospital staff. Staff cannot bend the no-visit rules, even when a family calls in desperation.

“I had a patient fall out of bed today and I had to call his wife and tell her and she couldn’t come see him, even though she pleaded and begged to come see him,” says Tracey Wilson, a nurse practitioner.

“One of the hardest moments was having to see a family member of a COVID patient say goodbye over an iPad,” says Tiffany Fare, a nurse in the biocontainment unit. “You can’t see your loved one and then they’re gone.”

There are very few opportunities to rest during a shift, although colleagues look out for one another and try to cover for each other when someone needs a break.

Cheryll Mack, a registered nurse in the emergency room, says she tries to get outside for 15 minutes during the day to breathe.

“It has given me relief, just fresh air,” Mack says.

Each shift concludes with a similar decontamination drill. Nurses and doctors must remove their personal protective equipment and shower immediately before coming in contact with their family at home.

“I take a very long, very hot shower. And then I usually sit on the couch and… read a book or watch some mindless reality show in order to destress,” says Martine Bell, a nurse practitioner.

Laura Bontempo, an emergency medicine physician, says she removes her work clothing and gear in a decontamination tent she has set up outside her home, and then wraps herself in a towel and runs inside to shower.

Then she puts the scrubs in the washing machine by themselves to not contaminate any other items.

Meghan Sheehan, 27, a nurse practitioner, says she drives home each night without turning on the radio and uses the quiet time to reflect on her shift and her patients. When she gets home, she tries hard not to dwell on the day.

“I go home, I shower immediately and try to have dinner with family, and try to not talk about it,” she said. “Nighttime is definitely the hardest because you’re constantly thinking about what the next day will brin

(Writing by Gabriella Borter in New York, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)

With cheers, New York nurses greet reinforcements from across the U.S.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – With loud cheers and applause, medical staff at New York’s Northwell Health network greeted 46 nurses on Tuesday who had arrived from all over the United States to reinforce hospitals as they battle the coronavirus pandemic.

U.S. deaths from the novel coronavirus topped 24,000 on Tuesday, according to a Reuters tally. There were nearly 583,000 confirmed cases, over 200,000 of which were in New York state alone.

Treating the large number of patients with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, has challenged hospitals in its U.S. epicenter. They have scrambled to find enough ventilators and other equipment, as well as beds and staff.

Northwell, the largest healthcare provider in New York, said it had contracted medical staffing companies to help it buttress efforts to treat patients at 18 hospitals across New York City, Long Island and Westchester county.

The “clap-in,” with dozens of staff cheering loudly and holding signs saying “Nurses are the heart of healthcare” and “Welcome, healthcare heroes,” was a surprise for the nurses who arrived on Tuesday afternoon for a half-day training session. Hailing from states including California, South Carolina, and Indiana, they are undergoing training in subjects ranging from operating ventilators to dealing with electronic medical records.

“It’s so heartwarming to see so many nurses come from so far away to assist us in our time of need,” said Maureen White, executive vice president and chief nurse executive at Northwell.

About 300 nurses from other areas have been enlisted over the past three weeks, said Launette Woolforde, Northwell’s registered nurse and vice president for nursing education.

Marybella Cole, who had arrived in New York from Lewiston, Idaho, said community was important to her.

“There’s no bigger calling than something like this,” she said.

Raymond Woods said he had left kids and grandchildren behind in Indiana so he could help.

“I have never been more proud to be a nurse. This is by far the most rewarding career I’ve had in my life,” he said.

(Reporting by Andrew Hofstetter; Writing by Bernadette Baum; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)

‘Here Comes the Sun’ gets U.S. hospitals through dark days of pandemic

By Barbara Goldberg

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The most powerful medicine being used to bolster the morale of New York area healthcare workers at the epicenter of the U.S. novel coronavirus crisis may well be music.

Daily infusions of upbeat songs from The Beatles’ classic “Here Comes the Sun” to the theme from the hang-tough movie “Rocky” are being pumped through hospital public address systems to boost the spirits of nurses, doctors and support staff.

About 545,000 people were diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States as of Sunday, and roughly 21,600 have died of the highly contagious illness.

A 4:30 p.m. daily dose of Australian pop singer Starley’s “Call On Me” has given strength to staff at one of Mount Sinai’s hospitals in New York City, who clap as a growing number of patients are discharged from the overwhelmed facility across the street from Columbia University.

“Some people would say to accept their fate. Well if this is fate then we’ll find a way to cheat,” Starley sings. “You know you can call on me, if you can’t stop the tears from falling down.”

In New Jersey, the “Rocky” theme song filled the air at St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Paterson when Dr. James Pruden, the hospital’s director of emergency preparedness, was discharged last week as he recovered from the virus, rolling in his wheelchair past cheering staff.

On New York’s Long Island, the joyful “Here Comes the Sun” blasts overhead on the public address system at Mount Sinai South Nassau in Oceanside every time a COVID-19 patient is discharged.

In Detroit, one of the newest U.S. hot spots for the fast-spreading disease, a Beaumont Health nurse said the 1969 Beatles hit was played not just when patients are discharged but each time they are taken off a ventilator to breath on their own.

“The smiles returning to the faces. Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been here,” rings out the song that George Harrison wrote about renewal after a long, dark winter.

(Additional reporting by Herbert Lash and Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Tom Brown)