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Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

> If hospital capacity is such a concern, why has there been just about zero effort in spinning up some kind of capacity to deal with Covid?

The first wave of COVID killed a bunch of doctors and nurses, and burnt a lot more out.

Then Delta made a bunch more doctors and nurses quit, with wide reports right now that 20% of nurses are looking to up and leave their job. Talking to my friends who are nurses, they are short staffed, and have been for some time.

On top of that, the way the US does medical training for both nurses and doctors ensures we don't have enough medical professionals during normal times. Nursing schools can't find instructors (pay is too low) and hospitals are purposefully limiting the number of residency spots available to ensure prices for medical care stay high (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine)#Financing...)

So, you know, business as usual in the US.

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> The first wave of COVID killed a bunch of doctors and nurses

I never heard about it before. Could you provide link to your claim?

Some interesting numbers at https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/new-report-reveal... and https://abcnews.go.com/Health/3600-us-health-workers-died-co...

All of that is pre-delta, remember that when COVID first hit in 2020 we still didn't have a good idea how it spread.

The tl;dr is that the US government doesn't do a good job of collecting statistics of how many health care workers died of COVID.

1.5k nursing home workers seems to be the one reliable # from the first article, and The Guardian is saying around 3600 healthcare workers in total.

https://www.statnews.com/2021/10/21/who-estimate-115000-heal...

WHO reports over 100k deaths of healthcare workers world wide.

So statistically a small #, but it doesn't account for the # of nurses who got COVID and had long term symptoms that kept them from going back to work, or who just decided to no longer work at all.

And it looks like these #s are highly biased towards major population centers, so it wasn't an even distribution from the country or anything.

1.5k nursing home workers out of a total of about 600k. That's 0.25%. Across the whole population, we've had 810k deaths out of 330M, which is also 0.25%. So we still have the same number of nursing home workers per capita. Except that, considered per nursing home resident, it's an increase, because the rate of nursing home residents dying has been much higher than the general population.

That's true, but it is an excellent advertisement for the risks of the job to others who may not have thought about this beforehand. So one person may die and a multiple may walk.

How is it an excellent advertisement for the risks of the job, when it is the same level of covid risk experienced by the population at large?

Because it is not the same level of risk. This can be trivially seen by comparing the percentage of health care workers that ended up with severe cases of COVID (or that died) compared to the regular population. Especially in the beginning of the pandemic when it wasn't really clear what we were dealing with and how it was spreading a lot of health care workers got very high doses and ended up in serious trouble. This isn't unusual for such situations, but it is unusual for it to happen at this scale.

com2kid gave 1.5k for the number of US nursing home worker deaths [1], which is the same 0.25% as the general population. [2] I could definitely believe that more american healthcare workers are dying than the general population, but what stats is this coming from?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29656232

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29656471

The thing to look at is when those deaths happened. And when they did they were disproportionate. Once personal protection for health care workers became widespread those severe cases and deaths dropped to much lower levels.

It's still not clear to me that the profession is riskier than just "being an American"? If you have numbers you would like to link to, I'm happy to dig into them.

https://www.who.int/news/item/20-10-2021-health-and-care-wor...

The 115k worldwide (I was trying to talk about the US, but ok) number comes from the WHO: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/345300/WHO-...

Their methodology is based on an assumption that healthcare workers are as likely to die of covid as the general population, that is, their job does not expose them to elevated risk. You can see the start of their methodology as:

"As a start, the number of deaths among HCWs was simply estimated by applying the crude mortality rate from each country (namely, the number of deaths reported to the WHO COVID-19 Dashboard divided by the population size) to the estimated number of HCWs in each country derived from ILOSTAT . This simple estimation considers HCWs to have a similar exposure to SARS-CoV-2 infection and risk of death to that of the general population..."

From there they do adjust for some things, but they are the ways that healthcare workers are different, demographically, from the general population. They are not looking at occupational risk.

I could still totally believe that healthcare workers are at elevated occupational risk, but a paper that assumes their risk is what you would expect from their demographics isn't going to help us answer that question.

Ok, I have done some serious searching and nothing came up that substantiates the claim so I'm moving into your camp.

Are we just ignoring all of the doctors and nurses who were fired for refusing vaccinations? They don't count?

They count but statistically speaking they are a blip in the numbers. It sucks to lose any manpower but given the risk they add to the overall system it could be still be a net positive.

I'm not an actuary though, I only have statistics background.

Did they become farmers after quitting, or remained doctors and nurses in locales they find agreeable?

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