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