“If nothing changes, healthcare
worker deaths could reach the thousands"
 |
| Chinese nurses hug during a ceremony celebrating International Nurses Day, Wuhan, China (ANSA) |
The International Council of Nurses releases a statement
decrying governments’ failure to monitor infection and death rates of
healthcare workers.
By Vatican News
Last Wednesday, the International Council of Nurses (ICN)
called on governments to better monitor and record infection and death rates of
health workers. It wrote that their failure to have already done so, “increases
the chances of more deaths and fails to honour those who have died”.
Thousands of nurses infected
In a statement released on their website, ICN wrote that
thousands of nurses have been infected with COVID-19 and hundreds have already
died. However, “governments cannot say exactly how many because they are not
collecting the data”, it says. Thus there has been a lack of accurate data,
leading to a “serious underestimation of the infection rate among nurses, and
the number of deaths”.
Estimations of deaths due to covid-19 among nurses
Last month, ICN reported “more than 100 nurses from around
the world had died after contracting COVID-19”. On the other hand, “the World
Health Organisation (WHO) had reported 23,000 healthcare worker infections”.
ICN now believes that the figures reported by both sources
are “shocking”, but may actually be much lower than they really are.
ICN has gathered further information from National Nursing
Associations, government figures and media reports. From that study, ICN
estimates that “at least 90,000 healthcare workers have been infected, and more
than 260 nurses have died”.
“ICN’s data is from 30 countries. It shows that, on
average, 6% of all confirmed cases of COVID-19 are among healthcare workers,
with a range from 0% to 18%. If that proportion were repeated globally, the 3.5
million confirmed cases of COVID-19 around the world would yield a figure for
the number of infected healthcare workers of 210,000”.
Consequences of lack of data
ICN’s Chief Executive Officer Howard Catton warned that “the
lack of official data on infections and deaths among nurses and other
healthcare workers is scandalous. Nurses and healthcare workers have been put
at greater risk because of the lack of PPE and poor preparedness for this
pandemic. As a result, we have seen infection rates and, tragically, deaths
rise on a daily basis. Governments’ failure to collect this information in a
consistent way means we do not have the data that would add to the science that
could improve infection control and prevention measures and save the lives of
other healthcare workers.
If governments fail to act on this, I fear we may look back
on this pandemic and count the dead among our nursing colleagues in the thousands.”
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét