The New York state health council on Tuesday approved Gov. Kathy Hochul‘s emergency edict requiring that all health care workers get booster shots for the coronavirus, despite complaints from nursing home industry officials that the mandate will worsen an already severe staffing shortage at many facilities.

The Public Health and Health Planning Council passed the measure after two hours of often stormy testimony.

Employees at hospitals and nursing homes are required to get their booster shots within two weeks of eligibility, which is based on when they got their first vaccine jabs. Many would have to get their booster shot immediately.

“You’re going to create a dangerous situation at nursing home across the state,” said James Clyne, CEO of LeadingAge New York that represents many of the state’s 611 nursing facilities.

Clyne said about three-quarters of the nursing homes he represents have already restricted admissions of new residents because of staffing shortages.

Meanwhile, the health department reports only 19.4 percent of nursing home workers — 28,389 out of 146,020 — have received their booster shots as of January 4 and Clyne questioned the practicality of reaching 100 percent compliance in a matter of weeks.

He said the booster mandate should be shelved until the state budget is approved in late March or early April. In her state of the state address last week, Hochul proposed retention bonuses for health care workers.

Even members of the health board urged Hochul and the state Health Department to take staffing issues into account when implementing and enforcing the booster mandate.

This mandate could have a “dramatic effect on the ground, possibly driving staff out at the wrong time,” said health council member Hugh Thomas, executive vice president of Rochester Regional Health.

“We are right now receiving a significant amount of questions and resistance to it to a booster mandate,” Thomas said.

He supports the booster mandate from a “public health perspective” but said calling for immediate compliance could cause more harm than good.

“Today we have 690 staff people out in our system for COVID,” he said. “Timing is extremely important. To impose this booster and have any effect on people walking out at this moment would have really significant detrimental effects on our operations.”

Another health board member, Tom Holt, president and CEO of Lutheran Social Services in Jamestown upstate, said, “Another 1 to 2 percent of the workforce out is going to have devastating effects … I struggle with balancing the right thing to do.”

But Hochul defended the booster mandate last Friday, saying it will help prevent staffers from getting infected and sick with the latest COVID outbreak caused by the highly contagious Omicron strain.

“We are already losing health care workers because of them testing positive without symptoms. They’ve been going home … It’s been a source of enormous stress,” Hochul said.

“We think it’s worth it to ask them to just do the right thing one more time. We’ll make sure that we are doing everything we can. All those levers, all those buttons we can push and this is why we wanted to make sure to get those health care workers boosted as well.”

Meanwhile, Hochul said the state saw 160 deaths related to the virus on Monday while 12,540 New Yorkers were hospitalized — continuing an upward trend. The Health Department recorded another 48,686 new positive cases.

But a significant chunk of the patients were hospitalized for other health reasons and only tested positive for COVID upon admission.