I don't mean to by cynical, but this is kind of my feeling. Throughout the pandemic I saw story and story about nurses getting overworked and being underappreciated. There was lots of talk of a nurse exodus.. and yet it's never happened. Even now it's just talk of a possible exodus. Maybe there are just no similar fields to switch into with comparable pay, but it seems as though nurses are sticking it out in the grand scheme. Are plenty of older nurses retiring? Yes. Are some younger nurses also leaving the field after being burned? Yep. But for the majority of nurses, the pay is still worth all the difficulty they see. Hearing about a co-worker getting attacked by an anti-vax patient is alarming, but until it happens to you you're not gonna make any major life changes to avoid that