Nurses and doctors across the country are exhausted by the ordeal they are confronting day after day.

“We are physically, emotionally and mentally exhausted,” Dr. Kate Grossman, a pulmonary and critical care physician in Columbia, Missouri, wrote in a message shared on Twitter.

“I have seen so many emergent intubations. I’ve seen people more sick than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Lacie Gooch, an intensive care unit nurse at Nebraska Medicine in Omaha, said in a video that Nebraska Medicine shared on Twitter this week.

And they are exasperated that people in their communities refuse to take the simple steps to prevent the airborne virus from continuing to spread.

“We’re tired. We’re understaffed. We’re taking care of very, very sick patients and our patient load just keeps going up. We’re exhausted and frustrated that people aren’t listening to us,” said Gooch, who said she has patients who don’t believe in COVID-19 even as they are hospitalized for it. “It kind of blows my mind and it’s frustrating.”

Medical care providers are risking their lives to help others and doing so at a time, nearly eight months into the pandemic, when PPE shortages persist.

NPR reported on this exchange today with NRP’s Will Stone and two nurses, Rachel Heintz of Bismark, North Dakota and Mary Turner of St. Paul, Minnesota:

HEINTZ: There are times when you feel like, I should be in four different places at once. People’s lives are hanging on, and I can’t even check if their oxygen level is OK or check if their airway is OK. Like, just the basic make sure that they’re still alive.

STONE: Not everywhere is quite as bad as North Dakota, but many places are starting to look that way. More than a thousand hospitals are critically short on staff, and the fears among health care workers are familiar – not enough people and not enough personal protective equipment.

HEINTZ: We are still worrying N95s for the entirety of our shift, whether that’s 12 hours – or the other day, I worked a 16-hour shift.

STONE: Before the pandemic, that would be unheard of. These N95 masks shield against tiny airborne droplets. And they’re only supposed to be used once. But now Heintz considers herself somewhat lucky. She even gets one per shift. Mary Turner, who works in a COVID ICU, is president of the Minnesota Nurses Association.

MARY TURNER: I have nurses in Minnesota that still wear their masks eight to 10 shifts.

Amanda Mull decries the illogic in the rules governors, mayors, and other authorities have put into place to contain the virus. That — plus the lack of a national plan and misinformation from the federal government — has confused the public, including Mull’s friend Josh, who had been dining indoors in restaurants.

Josh was irritated . . . If indoor dining couldn’t be made safe, he wondered, why were people being encouraged to do it? Why were temperature checks being required if they actually weren’t useful? Why make rules that don’t keep people safe?

Across America, this type of honest confusion abounds. While a misinformation-gorged segment of the population rejects the expert consensus on virus safety outright, so many other people, like Josh, are trying to do everything right, but run afoul of science without realizing it. Often, safety protocols, of all things, are what’s misleading them. In the country’s new devastating wave of infections, a perilous gap exists between the realities of transmission and the rules implemented to prevent it.

The problem isn’t, as Mull puts it, that leaders are moved to placate “centers of power” in their communities, it’s that the effects of closures reach far beyond the powerful: devastating businesses and putting employees out of work. State and city leaders are attempting a delicate balancing act — and failing.

It isn’t safe to dine indoors with folks who aren’t part of your household. And after many months it has become clear that safely opening schools, while keeping bars open isn’t likely to be a successful approach. Drinking, talking, laughing, and flirting in crowded indoor settings are inconsistent with reducing the infection rate, which makes for safer schools and families.

And in failing to keep us safe, our political leadership has also failed to sustain the economy. Many professionals, especially men (whose wives devote a disproportionate amount of time to tending to children) have thrived during the pandemic (often while shedding commuting time). Less advantaged workers, often people of color, have fared far less well.

Last week, Jerome Powell urged Congress (which hasn’t passed a comprehensive coronavirus bill since March) to step in.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Tuesday made a fresh appeal to Congress to pass another coronavirus relief package to help troubled businesses and out-of-work Americans.

In a talk to a business group in San Francisco, Powell said Congress’ tax and spending powers can directly target income support for groups that really need it, in a way that the central bank cannot.

“There hasn’t been a bigger need for it in a long time,” Powell said.

Getting us through this should be job number one for the White House and Congress. This is why we have a federal government. The failure of the Trump administration to do this, or even to try, is a huge reason we’re in the midst of a transition now.

The President, watching TV, tweeting, golfing, and whining that his loss was due to (imagined) fraud, hasn’t shown a scintilla of interest in curbing the virus. Or in assisting working Americans who have struggled financially. What about Congress? Which means, what about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell?

Joy Reid noted the severe impact of COVID-19 on families in Kentucky (with one-third of Kentuckians struggling to pay for food, heat, or rent, and experiencing 162,838 cases of the virus) and reviewed federal assistance programs expiring by year’s end, noting that the Senator McConnell has sent the Senate home on vacation. She suggests that the Majority Leader is indifferent to this suffering. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy responded:

Let me just underscore that level of desperation. I literally just came from Hamden, Connecticut from a food distribution event for the holiday weekend. And the organizers were panicking a little bit, because they had enough food for 300 people and they had what looked like about 300 cars lined up prior to the beginning of the event. And they were scrambling to figure out what they were going to say to all of these families who were now faced with perhaps going hungry over the holiday weekend.

People are at the end of their rope. And, you’re right, Mitch McConnell is refusing to do anything.

What we need for Mitch McConnell to do is just enter the negotiating room. He has refused to negotiate with anybody. With Nancy Pelosi, with Chuck Schumer. Again, because he is afraid of splitting his caucus. Right now about half of the Republicans want to do nothing. They think that this should just be all up to the states or that Joe Biden should be saddled with the entirety of the problem.

And so Mitch McConnell is sort of putting the unity of his caucus ahead of the survival of the nation, because there are 20 Republicans that would vote with 47 Democrats in order to pass a pretty substantial coronavirus relief bill. But he doesn’t want to split up the Republicans, again, heading into Georgia, heading into the new Congress.

You know, that’s kind of par for the course for Mitch McConnell, unfortunately.

Let’s stipulate: it’s not unheard of, or even objectionable, for the party leader of his caucus to have an eye on the next election. So long as s/he has one eye out for the American public.

With McConnell the next election is an interest that invariably overrides the national interest or the welfare of Americans. For eight months (since passage of the CARES Act) McConnell had his eyes on the November 3 election. Now he has his eyes on the January 5 election in Georgia. And after that?

Recall McConnell’s affirmation during the first term of the most recent Democratic president: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

On January 6, whether or not Republicans prevail in Georgia, the single most important thing McConnell will want to achieve will be to limit the Democrats to one term in the White House.

There have been questions about whether Joe Biden, who has reached out to the other side, seeking to unify the country, can coax the Kentuckian’s cooperation in defeating the coronavirus and putting the economy back on track. At this stage, McConnell hasn’t even acknowledged Biden as the president-elect.

Mike DeBonis puts the issue this way: “McConnell’s ongoing silence, even as the Trump administration moves to allow Biden to start his transition, leaves a question mark over what could be the most important Washington relationship of the next two years – between an incoming president who promised to tackle the nation’s most pressing concerns and the win-at-all-costs Capitol Hill operator who may well serve as his legislative gatekeeper.”

I’ll grant this reported assessment of McConnell as likely: “…GOP aides say he is unlikely to orchestrate a complete blockade.” Not a complete blockade.

That’s a very low bar.

I suggest keeping our expectations for bipartisan cooperation very low. I’m pretty sure we can count on Mitch McConnell’s eyes to be focused on November 8, 2022, no matter how many Americans die or struggle financially throughout 2021 and 2022 — while he aims to duck accountability for whatever bad stuff happens.

(Image: Nebraska Medicine Twitter via GMA/ABC News.)