5 Days at Memorial: A Stark Reflection on Post-COVID Workforce Realities

Lex E Santí, LCSW, MFA

Last summer I fell into 5 Days at Memorial on Apple TV—one of those late-night binges that sneaks up on you—but what the series opened in me was not casual entertainment. It was a revelation about a question I haven’t stopped turning over: what can an organization ask of a human being, and what should forever be beyond its reach?

The show never frames itself as a meditation on work, on duty, on the slow erosion of the private self by institutional expectation. But that is precisely what it becomes. The narrative—drawn from Hurricane Katrina’s devastation—follows a hospital staff whose professional lives, personal identities, and moral compasses collapse under the pressure of impossible circumstances. Yet beneath the specific tragedy of New Orleans lies a more universal indictment: the quiet normalization of sacrifice demanded by corporations, universities, governments, and “mission-driven” workplaces alike.

There is a moment in the first episode that caught me by the throat. The staff gather in a windowless space while a supervisor outlines what is expected: stay indefinitely; sleep on floors; abandon your own families—who may be drowning or stranded—in order to keep the institution running. There is a nod to duty, to patients, to professional codes. But underneath that, the subtext hums: your life belongs to us now.

And most of them agree. They stay. Some will never leave.

That scene is not about Katrina. It is about the quiet coercion embedded in our work cultures long before the pandemic: the idea that devotion to the institution is a moral good; that tending to your own life is selfish; that the organization’s survival is synonymous with your own.

But 5 Days at Memorial also forces us to confront the darker edge of this ethos: when the staff—overworked, isolated, abandoned by leadership, and deprived of any broader systemic support—ultimately override the medical principle of do no harm. Out of exhaustion, fear, moral injury, and impossible triage, some participate in hastened deaths of patients. Their personal moral frameworks erode because the institution demanded more than human beings can give.

This is the tragic line the show makes visible:

when an organization asks for your whole life, it inevitably begins to take your judgment, your ethics, your capacity for compassion, too.

The pandemic made this truth unavoidable. Before COVID-19, burnout in healthcare hovered around 30–40%. By 2021, it surpassed 55–60%, with some studies reporting rates closer to 70% in emergency and ICU settings. Moral injury—once a term reserved for military trauma—became a defining experience of nurses and doctors alike.¹

Meanwhile, corporate profits soared. The Fortune 500 reported a record-breaking 45% increase in profit in 2020—the same year healthcare workers were reusing masks, writing wills, and sleeping in garages to protect loved ones.²

It’s tempting to treat 5 Days at Memorial as a story about a uniquely catastrophic storm. But it is also a parable about the slow storms that buffet workers every day: understaffing normalized as efficiency; overwork reframed as passion; the expectation that you mute your own family’s needs for the sake of someone else’s operational continuity.

The question the show raises—and the pandemic has made impossible to ignore—is this:

When we give our whole selves to institutions, what parts of us disappear first? And who benefits from that disappearance?

As a therapist working through the COVID years, I sat with people who were crumbling under the weight of demands no human should ever bear. I watched the way organizations rely on a kind of quiet heroism—unpaid, unacknowledged, unchosen—to keep the machinery running. I watched students, clinicians, professors, frontline staff, parents, and administrators alike burn out from the expectation that work supersede life. And eventually, I burned out. My son was born and I was asked by my agency when I returned to work in late 2021 to take on all my old clients--to do the same work and I realized, I could not.

And I made a personal decision: I won’t return to structures that require the relinquishing of one’s home life, sanity, or moral center. Whatever clarity the pandemic brought, it brought that one to me sharply.

So when institutions ask, Will you come back? Will you give again what you gave before?

My answer is simple: Not at that cost. Not ever again.

There is too much life outside the fluorescent glow of duty. Too much humanity that is lost when organizations forget that the people who sustain them also need to be sustained.

5 Days at Memorial is not only a story about a city underwater. It’s a mirror held up to every place where we trade our evenings, our children’s faces, our ethical clarity, and our health—because someone higher up says the institution requires it.

But we get to ask, now, after everything:

What if it doesn’t?

And what if we don’t, either?

References:

¹ National Academy of Medicine; JAMA Network; CDC 2021 survey on healthcare worker mental health

² Fortune 500 2021 report on pandemic profit increases