Divakara Gouda, BS; Preet Mohinder Singh, MD; Prabhakara Gouda; Basavana Goudra, MD, FRCA, FCARCSI
Corresponding Author: Basavana Goudra, MD, FRCA, FCARCSI; Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Email: goudrab@uphs.upenn.edu
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Objectives: As of May 13, 2020, 1004 healthcare worker (HCW) deaths due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been reported globally. This study seeks to organize these deaths by demographic group, including age, gender, country and occupation. Methods: Medscape publishes a crowdsourced list of global HCW COVID-19 deaths. We collected data from this list, including age, gender, country, occupation and for physicians, specialty. Results: As of May 13, 2020, of 1004 HCW deaths, 550 were physicians. The average age of physician death is 62.49 and skewed right and non-physician death is 52.62 and approximately symmetrical. The majority of United States HCW deaths are male (64.1%). General practitioners, family medicine and primary care physicians account for 26.9% of physician deaths while anesthesiologists, emergency medicine and critical care physicians account for 7.4%. The United States has the highest number of HCW deaths but a similar number as a fraction of national cases and deaths compared to other developed countries. Conclusions: Among HCWs globally, there have been more reported deaths of physicians (vs. non-physicians), primary care physicians (vs. physicians of other specialties), males in the United States (vs. females in the United States), and HCWs living in the United States (vs. HCWs of other countries). Further research is needed to understand relative risks of death due to COVID-19 in each of these demographic groups.