Around 8% of New York’s hospital and nursing home staff and 11% of assisted living staff were still unvaccinated on Monday night, when the COVID-19 vaccine mandate went into effect, according to Gov. Kathy Hochul's office. 

Although 92% of the roughly 665,000 nursing home and hospital staff received at least that first vaccine dose by the mandate’s deadline, this still means that tens of thousands of health care workers did not.

What happens next to these unvaccinated workers is up to each individual facility. This includes possible termination or suspension until these workers receive the vaccine.

Adam Seth Litwin, an associate professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University, said the vaccine mandate is exacerbating an already existing staffing crisis.

“We’re already seeing hospitals delaying elective treatments and trying to sort of shuffle to move staff around within hospitals,” Litwin explained. “We're also seeing that hospitals are already declining to take transfer patients, patients transferred from other hospitals. So we're already starting to feel that.”

However, Litwin said a statewide vaccine mandate could also help jumpstart local efforts and give employers the confidence to issue their own vaccine mandates.

“I think in many ways the governor is trying to do employers a favor,” Litwin said. “It's very difficult for employers to issue their own vaccine mandate without implicitly taking a political stance. This way they can say ‘we need all of our employees to be vaccinated and really it's not our choice, the governor is telling us what to do.’ So it gives them an opportunity to mandate vaccines, at the same time empathizing and sympathizing with their employees who have legitimate or illegitimate reasons for not wanting to be vaccinated.”

Gov. Hochul on Monday agreed, saying hospitals have called to thank her for implementing the vaccine mandate first, allowing many facilities to issue their own vaccine requirements.

“The calls I've had to the leaders of hospitals today have thanked me for being firm on this,” Gov. Hochul said. “I would have much rather this just been voluntary, but if I have to take steps to protect the people in terms of making sure I have replacements, if necessary, I need to take those steps now and that executive order will do just that.”

The staffing crisis is expected to be severe for some areas, prompting Hochul to declare a state of emergency Monday night.

However, how severe is still unknown.

The Hochul administration and the health department have not released how many health care workers claimed a religious exemption, which areas are experiencing the worst of the staffing crisis, how many health care workers have been terminated as a result and how many backup health care workers have been deployed.