3 ms·

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?

• jacquesm 5y ago
  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.
  • jefftk 5y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29656232 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29656471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29656471
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      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.
      • jefftk 5y ago
        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.
        • jacquesm 5y ago
          https://www.who.int/news/item/20-10-2021-health-and-care-worker-deaths-during-covid-19 https://www.who.int/news/item/20-10-2021-health-and-care-wor...
          • jefftk 5y ago
            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-HWF-WorkingPaper-2021.1-eng.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y 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.
            • jacquesm 5y ago
              Ok, I have done some serious searching and nothing came up that substantiates the claim so I'm moving into your camp.