(Reuters) – Staffing agencies, which have deployed thousands of healthcare workers in recent weeks to jobs at hospitals in New York City and other areas hit hard by the coronavirus, say some of those temporary workers are no longer needed.
FILE PHOTO: An ambulance arrives at the emergency entrance outside Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in New York City, New York, U.S., April 13, 2020. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo
The trend, coupled with a flattening in the number of New Yorkers hospitalized with coronavirus infection, reinforces the sense that New York may have reached the peak of the health crisis.
“We have had to reassign some of our travelers who were going to New York,” San Diego-based staffing firm Aya Healthcare said in an emailed statement.
Demand for “travel nurses” jumped during March and early April in cities like New Orleans, and especially New York, which saw the nation’s largest spike in cases of COVID-19, the deadly respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
But New York, which ramped up its hospital bed capacity to around 90,000, has had only about 18,000 patients hospitalized for the past several days.
“We are seeing contracts in New York get cancelled,” Lindsey Scott, a spokeswoman for staffi