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The news in the first wave of the coronavirus epidemic was about doctors working in extreme or exhausted protective equipment around the world, so it is not surprising that many of the doctors and nurses who treated covids at that time they got infected with the virus. The situation has changed a lot by now, with attempts to replenish stocks of masks, gloves, face shields and other protective gear in developed countries around the world. With
healthcare workers are still at higher than average risk,
and with the sharp increase in the number of infected, this will be even more, since they will also have to participate in their care, who otherwise would never treat or care for infectious patients.
While in most countries the proportion of health workers in the population is less than 3 percent, less than 2 percent in almost all low- and middle-income states, about 14 percent of those infected with Covid-19 is reported to WHO. WHO.
In some countries, the figure can reach 35 percent, according to the World Health Organization. However, the availability and quality of the data, as the WHO notes, is limited, and ultimately it is impossible to determine whether doctors and nurses are infected inside or outside their workplace. What is likely is that, based on these proportions, thousands of healthcare workers around the world have already lost their lives in the coronavirus epidemic.
The internal situation was said last week in the standard daily coronavirus bulletin that
3.3 percent of those infected have been healthcare workers so far, which is equivalent to nearly 4,000 people compared to the current population of nearly 120,000.
It is also known from the website of the Hungarian Medical Chamber that the epidemic has so far claimed three lives among healthcare workers. It is memorable that the first Hungarian hospital worker to fall victim to the virus was a patient barrel in Tatabánya, but one of the Eger hospital gynecologists and the Nyíregyháza hospital director general also died in Covid-19.
Therefore, the international situation in Hungary is good, as confirmed by the report published by Amnesty International in early September.
According to this, the new type of coronavirus caused the death of more than 7,000 health workers around the world, the situation is the worst in Mexico, where it has been proven that 1,320 people in medical care die from the virus. The second on the list is the United States, with 1,077 health workers killed, the United Kingdom third with 649 and the fourth with Brazil with 634 victims.
There was a much higher chance of being infected with a coronavirus by a doctor or nurse at work at the beginning of the epidemic, when an adequate quantity and quality of protective equipment was not available, it was not yet used routinely and it did not exist protocols for the care of covid. now, months after the outbreak.
As Beatrix Oroszi, head of the working group of the Infectious Surveillance team of the Ministry of Innovation and Technology, said at a recent event at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences: while the risk of infection in health workers in the first wave it was ten to twelve times bigger, it’s only two times bigger. In the spring, almost all affected doctors and nurses still contracted the infection at work, but now in half of the cases this cannot be justified, the specialist said according to Medicalonline.
At the same event, Veronika Müller, director of the Department of Pulmonology at Semmelweis University, spoke that although
the risk has decreased, the danger has not passed,
Also, as more and more patients, more and more rooms are opened for Covid, many healthcare workers are being directed to care for those who have done something completely different thus far.
The most critical cross-section of patient care is nursing capacity, and increased workload has not only physical and psychological consequences, but also immunological consequences.
Veronika Müller pointed out and added that nurses work with the highest exposure.
The main reason for the increased vulnerability of healthcare workers is that, especially those who work with directly infected patients, are exposed to the virus at much higher doses and closely. In Covid departments, intensive care units, millions of infectious virus particles circulate in the air, and doctors and nurses are dressed from head to toe with their own protection, with suits, double masks, face shields, glasses, gloves doubles, etc. you need to pierce a vein, resuscitate, change bedding and do all the other tasks that are already hard physical work.
However, the WHO material already mentioned draws attention not only to the physical risks but also to the extreme psychological stress caused by the epidemic. Among healthcare workers, the risk of suicide was already high before COVID-19, and one in four healthcare workers caring for Covid patients now suffers from depression or anxiety and one in three suffers from insomnia, according to a scientific investigation.
Photo: Koszticsák Szilárd
At home, on November 7, the national chief physician updated the procedure for the care of those infected by coronavirus, detailing in several points the actions necessary to protect doctors and nurses. Among other things, in which departments what protective equipment should be provided or what should be substantially disposable. It accurately describes in which healthcare situations staff are exposed to low or high risk, and also that if they have not been protected for any reason, they should be placed under epidemiological surveillance for 10 days and undergo a PCR test at the beginning and at the end. . . Anyone in a low-risk situation does not need to be quarantined, but does need to do “self-monitoring”: they should measure their fever twice a day and watch for any symptoms.
Emmi’s latest instruction also highlights protecting the health of healthcare workers. The document signed by Miklós Kásler is particularly dual: although it has strict requirements for daily registration and surveillance of protective equipment, it does not forget that the health worker is also a person who must be provided “rich food in calories ”.
(Cover image: Pascal Rossignol / Reuters)
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