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Infection statistics in different countries show that doctors can make up one third of the total number of infected
In the fight against Covid-19, medical personnel around the world pay a very high price. Thousands of health workers became infected with the virus, and the number of dead doctors is growing steadily.
Doctors, nurses, nurses and other hospital staff are the most vulnerable group, despite protective suits and masks. And their disease also proceeds in the most severe form.
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Viral load
According to experts, this is mainly due to the concentration of the virus around them.
After entering the body, the virus infects the cells and begins to reproduce itself, create its own copies. These copies accumulate in the human body over the next few days, exacerbating the patient’s condition.
The higher the concentration of the virus, the more severe the form of the disease associated with it and the more contagious the patient is.
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Every day, health workers deal with an increased concentration of viral infection, and therefore they are not only more likely to become infected than others, but their disease is more severe
“The more virus there is in me, the more likely it is that I will pass it on to others,” explains Professor Wendy Barclay of the Institute of Infectious Diseases at Imperial College London.
Doctors are in close proximity to the infected and are prone to not just getting infected, but getting the virus in large doses.
According to WHO, one of the patients in Wuhan, China, who underwent elective surgery, infected 14 health workers, although at that time he still had no symptoms of coronavirus.
“The immune system of even a very healthy person struggles with all these viruses with difficulty. The more the virus enters the body, the stronger the struggle between it and immunity,” says Professor Barclay. “If you conduct an experiment on animals, infecting them with different doses of the virus, the worst condition will be for those who have been given the most virus. “
How Covid-19 enters the body
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In a person with Covid-19, the virus can sit in the upper respiratory tract and spread through breathing or coughing.
“Every time we breathe or talk, drops fall from our nasopharynx into the air,” says Wendy Barclay in an interview with BBC Newsnight.
Some of these drops settle on the surface, so this attention is paid to the requirements to maintain distance and wash hands.
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It is not known how much a person needs to inhale or touch such infected drops to get sick himself.
“In the case of the flu virus, which is very well studied, three particles are enough to enter the body to start the infection. So far, the dose of Sars-CoV-2 (Covid-19) is not known enough, but perhaps the picture is the same,” explains expert.
Risk at the forefront
At the moment, it is impossible to accurately measure the risks for medical staff who are constantly in the viral environment.
There is only some data from the World Health Organization (WHO) that can be used to draw certain conclusions. For example, during the 2002–2003 SARS outbreak, 21% of all confirmed cases in the world were medical personnel.
Similar statistics are now being traced. In Italy, for example, more than 6,200 infected are doctors. The total number of cases in the country is more than 120 thousand.
In Spain, there are currently over 6,500 people with Covid-19, representing 12% of the total number of infected.
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In Spain, the number of infected doctors currently stands at 12% of the total
In early March, China reported approximately 3,300 ill doctors and hospital staff. As a percentage, it is 4-12% of all confirmed cases.
One of the British public health officials said in a BBC comment that in some hospitals in the country, up to 50% of staff went to sick leave or self-isolation.
If measures to control the spread of infection do not work, hospitals themselves can become foci of infection.
Doctors have already told the BBC how they tried ahead of time to send patients who did not have a coronavirus home in order to protect them from possible infection.
Weak defense
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Health workers in Zimbabwe start a strike, and three-week hard quarantine declared in the country
It is precisely this potential infection that angers healthcare workers in a number of countries because they lack personal protective equipment (PPE).
In France, doctors filed a lawsuit against the government because, according to them, it did not order the increase in the production of medical masks, which jeopardized the doctors themselves.
Zimbabwean doctors and nurses went on strike in protest of the lack of PPE at the time when strict quarantine for three weeks was introduced in the country.
In Britain, Neil Dixon, executive director of the Confederation of Health Workers, said the lack of PPE undermines the trust of doctors and nurses in the system.
Although the country’s authorities have resorted to army assistance to distribute medical masks among health workers, “it will take some time to restore lost trust,” Dickson said.
“Another problem is that the production of these goods is concentrated in Asia and China,” he emphasizes. “And for China in the long term it will be very difficult to ensure the supply of the necessary volume.”
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