Where Are All The Covid Deaths Among Health Care Workers?
03/16/2021
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From the New York Times:

They Died Saving Others From Covid. Will Anyone Count Them?

Medical workers are called heroes. But there hasn’t been a national reckoning over the many thousands lost to Covid. Here are a few of the people who gave their lives while on the front lines of the pandemic.

By Andrew Jacobs
March 15, 2021

Dr. Claire Rezba is exhausted from counting the dead.

An anesthesiologist in Virginia, Dr. Rezba, 41, has spent the past year running a Twitter feed that memorializes American health care workers who have died of Covid-19. So far, she has published more than 2,500 tributes to the doctors, emergency room nurses, respiratory therapists and mental health counselors cut down in their prime. Although she knows there are at least a thousand other deaths that remain unrecognized, Dr. Rezba plans to discontinue the project at the end of March.

That would be at least 3500 deaths among health care workers.

… The number of medical workers who lost their lives to the virus over the past year remains elusive. The federal government does not have a system for accurately counting these fatalities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists more than 1,400 deaths, but its data covers less than one-fifth of the nation’s health-care work force.

Five times 1400 is 7,000.

Its sister agency, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, counts roughly the same number of worker deaths [1,400], but those figures include only nursing home staff.

The best estimate comes from a joint project by Kaiser Health News and The Guardian newspaper that has documented more than 3,500 health care worker deaths in the United States since last March.

So, all told, the total fatalities among health care workers appear to be somewhat under 10,000.

But what are denominators?

The NYT’s count of Covid deaths in the U.S. so far is 535,000.

So, less than 2 percent of Covid deaths are to health care workers.

How many health care workers are there? Health care is 17.7% of the GDP and Census estimates the number of health care workers at 20.5 million. So that’s a death rate among health care workers of under 0.05% or under 1/2000th.

Perhaps health care workers’ immunes systems tend to be well-tuned by exposure to other germs?

Also, health care workers tend to be relatively safety conscious and vigorous, with jobs that have them on their feet a lot.

[Comment at Unz.com]

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