Some California hospitals have a nurse vacancy rate of 30%, stressing overworked staff and causing some to leave the industry earlier than they planned.

Starting today, as many as 48,000 University of California academic workers — including teaching assistants, postdoctoral scholars and graduate student researchers — are set to strike at all 10 UC campuses, a move that could cause some classes, grading and lab work to grind to a halt just weeks ahead of final exams.

Kaiser Permanente facilities in the greater Bay Area that had the demonstrations included medical centers in  San Jose, Manteca, Modesto, Antioch, Fremont, Oakland, San Francisco and Walnut Creek.

The strike begins Monday at Kaiser facilities in Fresno, Sacramento, San Francisco and in San Jose at Kaiser’s San Jose Medical Center on Hospital Parkway. The Kaiser facility at the Santa Clara Medical Office Building on Lawrence Expressway also is one of the strike targets.

The union representing 2,000 Kaiser Northern California mental health works announced plans for an open-ended strike this month, citing high workloads and long waits for patients.

Rival California health insurers say the special deal is unfair and could leave them with high-need patients.

Up to 40,000 union members at the health care giant are expected to protest in solidarity with striking engineers across the Bay Area and Sacramento.

Long-simmering disputes with hospital employee unions over staffing are reaching crisis points, as almost a third of California hospitals report insufficient numbers of critical workers, including nurses, technicians and janitors.

New tax credits are also expected to lower premiums by an average of $180 per month for roughly 280,000 Bay Area residents.

After a year of planning, the multi-pronged strategy to house more people was announced at a virtual news conference on Tuesday.

Kaiser and the county have played the blame game for months, each accusing the other of mishandling Covid testing and inoculation.

A look back at some of the events—big and small—that shaped the past 12 months of tumult during the pandemic.

About 8,500 appointments scheduled through the county between now and March 21 will be transferred to the Oakland-based hospital chain.

The country’s most populous state averaged more than 560 deaths a day at its peak in January, according to The New York Times.

According to Cal-OSHA, Kaiser’s San Jose Medical Center is one of the top pandemic-safety violators in the state.

Over the course of a month the variant has increased from 3.8 percent of the cases in California to 25.2 percent.