Across the country, medical workers are struggling to keep up. At a hospital system near Detroit, relief workers from the Pentagon are coming in to help.
And as Americans line up for booster shots, pharmacies are scrambling to staff strained vaccination sites.
The bottleneck is ripe to get worse as President Biden pushes booster shots as part of a renewed COVID strategy headed into winter.
That's a welcome message for health professionals, but stressful for pharmacy leaders. CVS tells Newsy it's onboarding 20,000 new employees right now and boosted its hourly pay to attract workers. Walgreens tells us it, too, boosted its hourly pay and is offering a $1,000 bonus to pharmacists who are or become certified to administer the vaccine.
The Kaiser Family Foundation just found a huge jump in the number of vaccinated adults who have their booster. It's about a quarter now — way up from just 10% in October. And some 56% more say they definitely or probably will get it. That's almost 103 million people looking for a way to get a booster, many of them at understaffed pharmacies.
