This series was supported by the Pulitzer Center and produced in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations, with additional support from the Gertrude Blumenthal Kasbekar Fund and the Puffin Foundation.
MANILA, Philippines — It all happened so fast for Diane Mae Gamboa.
One day in March 2022, she walked into the US embassy for an interview. A few days later, her visa was approved, her passport was stamped, and a green card was on its way. There was a nursing job waiting for her at a long-term care facility in Schenectady, New York, some 8,700 miles from her home in Puerto Princesa, a city tucked into a shimmering bay on the white-sand island of Palawan.
Gamboa, then 35, would soon be heading to the United States, where a crisis was unfolding. Wave upon wave of covid infections had eviscerated staff at hospitals and nursing homes across the country, leaving them reaching for increasingly desperate ways to cope. Nurses were loaded up with ever-more patients, straining the limits of safety. Shifts were stretched beyond the standard 12 hours. In Washington state last October, a nurse called 911 from inside an understaffed emergency room, pleading for support. “We’re drowning,” she said.
Gamboa, nervous and excited, felt swept up by the speed with which the US system pulled her to work in the country. “Even if it scares me,” she said, “I’m just going to go.”
Diane Mae Gamboa, the night before she flew from the Philippines to the US.
Photo: Kimberly dela Cruz for Quartz
During the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, from February to April 2020, the US healthcare sector shed more than 1.5 million jobs, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics—nearly 10% of the total healthcare workforce at the time. And the nursing shortage is set to grow significantly worse in the coming years. Research published in April by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing and the National Forum of State Nursing Workforce Centers found that 100,000 nurses had left the profession in the past two years, and
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