Not having enough workers causes a cascading failure as remaining workers quit from overwork. Organizations must stay ahead of the problem or go out of business.
At some point, patients start dying from neglect and even if there’s no alternative the medical establishment must close it’s doors to limit liability.
The fire department that I retired from currently has more people off “sick” than in any time in its history. The vast majority are vaccinated people with Omicron and the sniffles. Our governor ordered all unvaccinated health care workers including firefighters and police officers be fired. The department was just about to comply when this Omicron “emergency” struck. So instead of being fired unvaxed fire fighters, and fire officers are being forced to work mandatory overtime to cover for their sick vaxed coworkers. The only promise that they have received is that they will still be fired as soon as they are no longer needed.