An Overview of Health Care Worker Reported Deaths During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Results and Discussion

As of May 13, 2020, a total of 1004 HCW deaths have been reported globally by Medscape. More than half of the HCWs were physicians (54.8%). Nonphysicians in our study included nurses, nursing assistants, physician assistants, paramedics, technicians, patient transporters, social workers, pharmacists, epidemiologists, and administrative staff.

The mean age of physician deaths is 62.49 years and nonphysician deaths is 52.62 years. Disproportionately more physician deaths occurred in the age group above 50 years, especially 60 to 80. This is possibly due to the skewed age distribution between physicians and nonphysicians. Of approximately 2 million registered nurses in the United States, 22% are over the age of 55. Similarly, 20% of approximately 1.2 million physicians are over the age of 55.² This difference in average age must be accounted for in understanding this data.

In the United States, more male than female HCW deaths have been reported (132 vs 74). This difference is consistent with other published data on gender susceptibility to COVID-19. Jin et al. found that two thirds of COVID-19 patients were male and male cases tended to be more serious.³ Other studies have also addressed issues such as gender and ethnicity in relation to HCW deaths. Disproportionately more African Americans have died in the United States. In the United Kingdom, black, Asian, and minority doctors have died in disproportionately larger numbers.⁴

General practitioner/family medicine/primary care physicians form the largest subset of physician deaths (26.9%, Table 1). Anesthesiologists and emergency medicine and critical care physicians, who are often frontline workers, form a smaller subset (7.4%). A possible explanation is that they are more likely to interact with asymptomatic patients and have inadequate personal protective equipment.⁵

The United States has more HCW deaths that any other country but not as a fraction of cases and total national deaths. Using these metrics, the United States is similar to other developed countries including the United Kingdom, Italy, and France. In the United States, New York and New Jersey have the highest number of HCW deaths

A limitation of this study is that the Medscape list of HCW deaths is a convenience sample and likely to be incomplete, as it is crowdsourced from its readers. There are likely more than 1004 HCW deaths globally. Reporting of deaths also varies from country to country. Physicians, for example, may have more access to testing and treatment and as a result be overrepresented compared with nonphysicians. At least 2 reported deaths were suicides. Although the issues of work-related stress and burnout among HCWs should not be understated, this is another factor that may skew our data.