The coronavirus is taking a serious toll on the doctors and nurses risking their lives while treating the disease.
Carlo Palermo, head of Italy’s hospital doctors’ union was almost in tears when he told reporters in Rome that two nurses had committed suicide as a result of the emotional trauma. “I can stand those who look death in the eye every day, who are on the front lines, who work with someone who maybe is infected, then a few days later you see him in the ICU or die,” he said. “It’s [an] indescribable condition of stress.”
Hospitals worldwide are straining under the load of too many patients and not enough medical equipment and protective gear for doctors and nurses, The Washington Post reported.
On Saturday, China singled out its more than 3,000 doctors and nurses who have been infected with the disease and the 14 who reportedly died from it, the AP said. Numbers of those dying and infected are greatly reduced in China, however.
The World Health Organization’s report found that health care workers were actually not more at risk of infection than other people. But the WHO also noted that “attention to the prevention of infection in health care workers is of paramount importance in China. Surveillance among health care workers identified factors early in the outbreak that placed [health care workers] at higher risk of infection, and this information has been used to modify policies to improve protection.”
“It’s not that they’re getting infected at higher rates; instead, they’re getting sicker than one might expect on the basis of their age,” says Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College, of health care workers in Wuhan.
The early data from the European countries hit the hardest by Covid-19 indicates health care workers account for a significant share of their Covid-19 cases. In Spain, government officials reported on Tuesday that medical staff accounted for 14 percent of the country’s nearly 40,000 reported cases. In Italy as of March 22, almost 1 in 10 coronavirus cases was a health care worker.
(Vox) Pix by AFP
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