COVID-19: Healthcare Workers three times more likely to get infected, study shows

Healthcare workers are three times more likely to become infected during the COVID pandemic as compared to the rest of the population, a recent study has said emphasizing why medics need to be vaccinated on priority. As the COVID infection continues to spiral across the world, the research stated that one out of every five healthcare workers who tested positive was asymptomatic and unaware that they had been infected by the coronavirus.

The study published in ERJ Open Research included a total of 2,063 health care staff, who were all tested for the presence of COVID antibodies. According to experts, the presence of COVID antibodies implies that the person has had the infection somewhere in the past. The research was conducted between the period of May and September 2020.

14.5 per cent infected 

The blood tests showed that 14.5 per cent of the health care workers had been infected. This is more than three times higher than the proportion of people infected in the local population. The researchers then bi-furcated the healthcare professionals according to the specific fields they worked in.

They found the highest rates of infections among the workers were in dentistry (26 per cent), health care assistants (23.3 per cent) and hospital porters (22.2 per cent). Additionally, the infection rate amongst the administrative staff matched that of doctors at 21.1 per cent. Out of the total, roughly 18.7 per cent did not think they ever had Covid-19 and were completely asymptomatic.

“A lot of attention during the pandemic has been around PPE for doctors and nurses but we found that dentists, health care assistants and porters were the staff most likely to test positive," said lead researcher Professor James Chalmers, a consultant respiratory physician from the University of Dundee, UK.

However, health care workers who had been infected were very unlikely to contract COVID-19 a second time in the following six months, the study showed. This comes as the coronavirus infection, which originated late in December 2019 has spiralled out to infect 168,107,326 people in the world with over 3,489,658 fatalities. Out of the total, 149,495,823 have recovered.

Image: AP