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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Indian J Med Paediatr Oncol 2020; 41(04): 454-457
DOI: 10.4103/ijmpo.ijmpo_245_20
Original Article

Braving the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic – Quandary of Health-Care Workers

Arjun Gurmeet Singh
Department of Head and Neck Oncology, Tata Memorial Centre, Homi Bhabha National Institute, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
,
Pankaj Chaturvedi
Department of Head and Neck Oncology, Tata Memorial Centre, Homi Bhabha National Institute, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
› Author Affiliations Financial support and sponsorship Nil.
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Abstract

Context

Determining how bad health-care providers have been affected by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 19 (SARS-CoV-19) pandemic is difficult because governments and organizations have not released this data.

Aims

The aim of the study was to determine the number of health-care workers infected and dead globally due to SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Subjects and Methods

To circumvent these issues, an unconventional approach using Google's programming platform was adopted to aggregate relevant articles reporting the number of confirmed cases and deaths among health-care workers. Locally sourced country-specific data were ensured by individually searching the regional domains of 179 countries.

Results

Reports covering 67 countries showed that 99,847 health-care workers (HCWs) have been reported to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus, with a majority reported in Europe. This included confirmed reports of 1732 doctors and 348 nurses. Five hundred and thirty-eight deaths were reported in 32 countries, amounting to a mortality among HCWs globally of 4%.

Conclusions

Although this number might be an underrepresentation of the actual figures out there, it underscores the dire reality of the situation. The information provided is paramount for policymakers to improve services among this vulnerable group.

Keywords

Coronavirus disease 2019 - doctors - health-care workers - nurses - severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2

Supplementary Material



Publication History

Received: 19 May 2020

Accepted: 25 June 2020

Article published online:
17 May 2021

© 2020. Indian Society of Medical and Paediatric Oncology. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial-License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.)

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