Hospital Employee Health – April 1, 2021
April 1, 2021
View Archives Issues
-
No One Really Knows How Many HCWs Have Died of COVID-19
While healthcare workers literally bear witness to death, who tolls the bell for them? There is no official count for healthcare workers who have died of COVID-19. Ask how many of these heroes have put their lives on the line and lost them in the process, and one enters a maze of incomplete reports collected from limited jurisdictions, mixed with extrapolations and models confounded with variables.
-
Staggering COVID-19 Mortality Rates During Pregnancy
Pregnant women, some of them healthcare workers, are dying at high rates after contracting COVID-19. The COVID-19 vaccine risk is unknown because pregnant women were not included in early clinical trials. However, the emerging data on the threat of COVID-19 infection during pregnancy is tilting the risk-benefit equation.
-
The Long Tail of COVID-19
There now is an open question about whether some people — healthcare workers and the public alike — could experience recurrent COVID-19 symptoms for years. This is the nightmarish world of the so-called “long-haulers,” who have developed a seemingly chronic condition the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention is calling “long COVID.”
-
A Third Arrow in the Quiver: FDA Grants Emergency Use of New Vaccine
The Food and Drug Administration has issued an emergency use authorization for a third vaccine COVID-19 in the United States, approving Janssen Biotech’s vaccine for administration to those 18 years and older.
-
Long-Term Care Workers Refusing COVID-19 Vaccines
In what would appear to go beyond vaccine hesitancy to outright refusal, 62.5% of staff at thousands of skilled nursing facilities have turned down COVID-19 vaccines. Along with other healthcare workers in hospitals and other settings, long-term care staff were considered a top vaccine priority because they care for frail residents, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.
-
U.K. Physicians with Long COVID Call for Action
In an unusual appeal from healthcare workers stricken with the malingering symptoms of long COVID, a letter signed by more than 40 physicians calls for more surveillance and research into the poorly understood condition.