At least 90,000 healthcare workers worldwide are believed to have been infected with Covid-19, and possibly twice that, amid reports of continuing shortages of personal protective equipment, the International Council of Nurses (ICN) said on Wednesday.
The disease has killed more than 260 nurses, it said in a statement, urging authorities to keep more accurate records to help prevent the virus from spreading among staff and patients.
The Geneva-based association said a month ago that 100 nurses had died in the pandemic sparked by the novel coronavirus that emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year.
“The figure for healthcare workers infections has risen from 23,000 to we think more than 90,000, but that is still an underestimation because it is not [covering] every country in the world,” Howard Catton, ICN’s chief executive officer, told Reuters Television in its lakeside offices.
The 90,000 estimate is based on information collected on 30 countries from national nursing associations, government figures and media reports. The ICN represents 130 national associations and more than 20 million registered nurses.
Catton, noting that 3.5 million cases of Covid-19 have been reported worldwide, said: “If the average health worker infection rate, about 6 per cent we think, is applied to that, the figure globally could be more than 200,000 health worker infections today.
“The scandal is that governments are not systematically collecting and reporting on this information. It looks to us as though they are turning a blind eye which we think is completely unacceptable and will cost more lives,” Catton, added.
The World Health Organisation (WHO), which is coordinating the global response to the pandemic, says that its 194 member states are not providing comprehensive figures on health worker infections as they grapple with the unprecedented crisis.
The WHO last said on April 11 that some 22,000 health workers were thought to have been infected.
The ICN said it now believes those “shocking” figures to significantly underestimate the reality.
“This failure to record both infection rates and deaths among healthcare workers is putting more nurses and their patients in danger,” the statement said.Healthcare workers on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak are getting sick by the thousands.
China's National Health Commission said on Monday that more than 3,300 healthcare workers nationwide had been infected. At least 13 have died, according to the South China Morning Post, including doctor Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist who was censored by Chinese authorities after warning colleagues about the new virus.
On Tuesday, one of Li's ophthalmology coworkers at Wuhan Central Hospital, Mei Zhongming, also died from the virus. Another doctor at the same hospital, Jiang Xueqing, died from the disease on Sunday. He was head of thyroid and breast surgery there.
The most senior health worker known to have died from the coronavirus, Liu Zhiming, was a neurosurgeon and director at the Wuchang hospital in Wuhan. He died las month, as did a 29-year-old doctor in Wuhan named Peng Yinhua. He had postponed the wedding to help treat people with the coronavirus.
