Adaptive staffing can mitigate essential worker disease and absenteeism in an emerging epidemic

Essential worker absenteeism has been a pressing problem in the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly 20% of US hospitals experienced staff shortages, exhausting replacement pools and at times requiring COVID-positive healthcare workers to remain at work. To our knowledge there are no data-informed models examining how different staffing strategies affect epidemic dynamics on a network in the context of rising worker absenteeism. Here we develop a susceptible–infected–quarantined-recovered adaptive network model using pair approximations to gauge the effects of worker replacement versus redistribution of work among remaining healthy workers in the early epidemic phase. Parameterized with hospital data, the model exhibits a time-varying trade-off: Worker replacement minimizes peak prevalence in the early phase, while redistribution minimizes final outbreak size. Any “ideal” strategy requires balancing the need to maintain a baseline number of workers against the desire to decrease total number infected. We show that one adaptive strategy—switching from replacement to redistribution at epidemic peak—decreases disease burden by 9.7% and nearly doubles the final fraction of healthy workers compared to pure replacement.