In the first months of 2020, doctors were tasked with dealing with a little-known virus that caused the world’s worst pandemic in a century – risking their lives in the process. During the study period, from March 2020 to December 2021, 622 more physicians died than expected, according to a recently published study.
Physicians had much lower excess mortality than the general population, possibly indicating that protective equipment and workplace measures were effective, the researchers wrote.
Despite a potentially higher risk of being exposed to COVID-19, practicing physicians had a lower risk of being infected than non-practicing physicians.
“Non-active physicians are those who are retired, semi-retired, or simply not actively practicing medicine. More research is needed, but the fact that active physicians had lower excess deaths suggests that workplace interventions could have protected them,” said Mathew Kiang, ScD, assistant. professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University and author of the study, told ABC News.
Yet healthcare workers found themselves with limited protective gear early in the pandemic.
“We felt helpless because there were a lot of unknowns… that helplessness was felt in the fact that we couldn’t adequately protect ourselves,” said Dr Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California at San Francisco. ABC News. He then recounted discussions about disinfecting previously used masks with UV light and how mask drives were held to get more supplies.
At the time, the hospital environment was filled with uncertainty and fear.
“At first, as I like to say, we all opened our textbooks to COVID and we only had blank pages because there had been no experience with COVID,” said Dr. William Schaffner , professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University. Medical Center, told ABC News.
“It was a very scary time. I remember seeing the first patient who had COVID and even though I’m not in the highest risk category, I was really scared,” Chin-Hong said. .
He said many of his colleagues left their hospital scrubs in the trunk of the car, showered before entering their homes, or even lived away from family during this time.
There were no excess deaths in the physician population after April 2021, just as vaccines became widely available, the study found. The study does not prove cause and effect between the two, but the presence of the vaccine was undoubtedly appreciated.
“Vaccines have certainly added a lot of comfort to health care in general and the delivery of it. They have provided that bonus of protection. We obviously saw an immediate benefit in our patient populations when the vaccines were deployed, that was like day and night,” said Dr. Darien Sutton, emergency physician and ABC News contributor.
Throughout the pandemic, nearly half of U.S. healthcare workers report experiencing burnout, with women being disproportionately affected compared to men.
“The pandemic has exacerbated all the metrics that define burnout. When you look at providers, from doctors to bedside nurses, many feel overworked, underpaid and undervalued in these positions,” Sutton said. .
The United States continues to average about 500 COVID deaths per day, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“If you are admitted with COVID, [physicians] are very firm in their treatment and expect even the most fragile patients to be able to get out of the intensive care unit and out,” Schaffner said.
“The main takeaway is that frontline healthcare providers like doctors are crucial in our response to the pandemic and we need to do a better job of protecting them in future outbreaks,” Kiang said.
