The International Council of Nurses has called on governments to better monitor and record infection and death rates of health workers, writing that failure to have already done so “increases the chances of more deaths and fails to honour those who have died.”
In a statement released on their website, the nurses council wrote that thousands of nurses have been infected with COVID-19 and hundreds have already died. However, “governments cannot say exactly how many because they are not collecting the data,” it says. Thus there has been a lack of accurate data, leading to a “serious underestimation of the infection rate among nurses, and the number of deaths.”
Last month, the council reported “more than 100 nurses from around the world had died after contracting COVID-19.” On the other hand, “the World Health Organization (WHO) had reported 23,000 health-care worker infections.”
The council now believes that the figures reported by both sources are “shocking,” but may actually be much lower than they really are.
The council has gathered further information from National Nursing Associations, government figures and media reports. From that study, it estimates that “at least 90,000 health-care workers have been infected, and more than 260 nurses have died.”
“(The council’s) data is from 30 countries. It shows that, on average, 6 per cent of all confirmed cases of COVID-19 are among health-care workers, with a range from 0 per cent to 18 per cent. If that proportion were repeated globally, the 3.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 around the world would yield a figure for the number of infected health-care workers of 210,000.”
International Council of Nurses chief executive officer Howard Catton warned that “the lack of official data on infections and deaths among nurses and other health-care workers is scandalous. Nurses and health-care workers have been put at greater risk because of the lack of PPE and poor preparedness for this pandemic. As a result, we have seen infection rates and, tragically, deaths rise on a daily basis. Governments’ failure to collect this information in a consistent way means we do not have the data that would add to the science that could improve infection control and prevention measures and save the lives of other health-care workers.
If governments fail to act on this, I fear we may look back on this pandemic and count the dead among our nursing colleagues in the thousands.”
