Like grocery store workers and other essential employees, their work cannot be done at home.
“As frontliners, we can do everything right but still be exposed because we are exposed to work, which we simply cannot avoid,” said Dr. David Rosman, a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and president of Massachusetts Medical, said. Society. “Being in health care at this point means you run the risk of having COVID.”
Rosman knows this firsthand. He experienced symptoms in January – he was tired and could not taste his food – after his wife, dr. Samantha Rosman, an emergency medicine physician at Boston Children’s Hospital, fell ill. The couple and their children, ages 8 and 10, all tested positive for COVID. No one became seriously ill.
They do not know exactly how they were exposed.
“But since March we have not been in a restaurant, we have not been in a grocery store, we have not been in a store,” said Rosman, 44. ‘Our existence is Instacart and home and work. The only possible point of contact for one of us is work. ”
To determine how many hospital workers COVID has contracted, the Globe surveyed the state’s largest hospital systems and academic medical centers, including Mass General Brigham, Beth Israel Lahey, UMass Memorial, Baystate, Wellforce, Boston Medical Center and Boston Children’s Hospital. Steward Health Care did not respond.
Mass General Brigham said more than 5,000 of his employees, or 6.6 percent, tested positive for COVID from the start of the pandemic until early February, while Beth Israel Lahey said that more than 3,000, or 8 , 5 percent, had COVID. At BMC, 11.8 percent of the workforce, or more than 1,000 people, tested positive for COVID in the same period.
As more health workers receive their vaccinations and slow down the spread of the community, the rate of new infections decreases.
The state Department of Public Health does not specifically report infections among hospital staff, but according to a 2020 law, the department must detect the occupations of people who test positive for COVID. This information was many months outdated until early February, when government officials, following inquiries from the Globe, released new figures that shed light on what kind of workers were most affected.
Government officials counted 4,275 Massachusetts nurses who tested positive between March 10 and December 31, 2020. During the same period, 3,178 caregivers, psychiatric and home health care providers tested positive, as well as 499 physicians and 921 medical assistants. The data do not specify whether these medical professions work in hospitals or other institutions.
It is more difficult to determine the number of deaths, although a project by The Guardian and Kaiser Health News counts 74 health workers in Massachusetts who died from COVID.
Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention estimates that more than 408,000 health workers contracted COVID and that more than 1,400 died.
“COVID is the first time I was really scared to go to work,” said Trish Powers, 58, a longtime nurse at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Powers has been thinking for many months about thoughts like “If I hold my patient’s hand, will I get sick?” and “Oh my god, did I touch my eye? Did I give myself COVID? ”
Her fears were not unfounded. She tested positive for COVID in mid-December, an infection she suspects in a hospital ward where employees remove their masks to eat and drink. Hospitals, including the Brigham, have designed break rooms that allow employees to sit 6 feet apart when unmasking. But there is still the possibility of transfer.
Powers, who runs the nursing association at the Brigham and usually spends hours at her feet in an operating room every shift, has been out of work for two months, and her recovery is hampered by heart complications and persistent fatigue.
It seems unfair that she got sick despite trying to follow the rules – wearing a mask, washing her hands, avoiding meetings – but she also knows how much worse it could have been. She will never forget the people she saw die in COVID last year when she was deployed to the ICU. “You’re so happy you’re OK,” she says to herself.
Hospital workers who test positive for COVID must stay home for at least ten days. But some, like Powers, can be out for weeks or months, depending on the severity of their illness. It has expanded an already stressed workforce.
During the boom in December and January, healthy employees worked extra shifts, skipped vacations and redeployed to new wards to keep up with patient demand, while so many of their colleagues were sick with COVID. At Baystate Health, for example, about 450 people were out of work in mid-December because they were ill or exposed to COVID.
Despite the large number of hospital workers that COVID has contracted, hospital officials claim that most are infected through exposure to the community, not during their shifts.
When caring for COVID patients, front-line masks wear masks, eye protection, gowns and gloves – which are largely effective in preventing infection if worn properly. Even staff who do not treat patients usually wear masks and eye protection during their work.
An increasing amount of evidence suggests that the spread of the virus by the community and demographic factors such as race and zip code are greater risk factors than the fact that someone works in a hospital, he said. Dr. Erica S. Shenoy, co-head of infection control at Massachusetts General Hospital, where more than 2,000 employees have tested positive for COVID over the past 11 months.
The number of health workers infected with COVID peaked in April and again around the winter holidays.
“We’ve seen patterns that look a lot like what happened in the community,” said Dr. Helen Boucher, head of infectious diseases at Tufts Medical Center, where about 600 employees tested positive for COVID. Boucher said contact detection indicates that almost everyone contracted their infections outside the hospital.
“Clusters arise when small groups of people gather, often in people’s homes, let them down and transfer takes place. “We are all human, and colleagues at work took part in these events,” she said.
But officials admit that clusters of infection occur in hospitals all the time – from two to three people in one unit which is positive to much larger outbreaks. An outbreak at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in September infected 57 people.
Lori Pannozzo, a nurse caring for COVID patients in the St. Louis intensive care unit Vincent Hospital in Worcester, said she feels exposed because she has to reuse masks at work. She believes she was infected by a COVID patient who had to intubate quickly, a process that releases breathing drops into the air.
Pannozzo coughed on New Year’s Eve, hours before she would work in the ICU; she tested positive for COVID that day. She begins to feel short of breath and develops pneumonia. She spent her 48th birthday sick on the couch in the Monson home she shares with her husband and son.
Weeks after she tested positive, Pannozzo was out of work and struggling to breathe while walking short distances.
“I’ve never been really anxious,” she said. “I was able to treat my patients similarly. Not breathing is scary. ”
Priyanka Dayal McCluskey can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @priyanka_dayal.