The pandemic is not the great equalizer: front-line labor and rationing in COVID-19 critical care

Abstract

<jats:p><jats:bold>BACKGROUND:</jats:bold> Framed as “the great-equalizer,” the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified pressure to adapt critical care labor and resulted in rationing by healthcare workers across the world.<jats:bold>OBJECTIVE:</jats:bold> To critically investigate how hospital intensive care units are critical sites of care labor and examine how rationing highlights key features of healthcare labor and its inequalities.<jats:bold>METHODS:</jats:bold> A practice-oriented ethnographic study was conducted in a United States academic ICU by a medical anthropologist and medical intensivists with global health expertise. The analysis drew on 57 in-depth interviews and 25 months of participant observation between 2020 and 2021.<jats:bold>RESULTS:</jats:bold> Embodied labor constitutes sites and practices of shortage or rationing along three domains: equipment and technology, labor, and emotions and energy. The resulting workers’ practices of adaptation and resilience point to a potentially more robust global health labor politics based on seeing rationing as work.<jats:bold>CONCLUSION:</jats:bold> Studies of pandemic rationing practices and critical care labor can disrupt too-simple comparative narratives of Global North/South divides. Further studies and efforts must address the toll of healthcare labor.</jats:p>